Summer 2014

HARVARD POLITICAL REVIEW

THE FOURTHWAVE FIRST LADY

REDEFINING ANOREXIA

INTERVIEW: THOMAS MENINO

VOLUME XLI NO. 2, SUMMER 2014 HARVARDPOLITICS.COM

BODY POLITIC THE PHYSICAL AS POLITICAL, FROM SYRIAN REFUGEE CAMPS TO AMERICAN NURSERIES

THE SHORT LIST Your one-stop source to the most scintillating and dynamic political content.

HARVARDPOLITICS.COM/THE-SHORT-LIST

BODY POLITIC

8 Redefining Anorexia Anonymous

12 Genital Mutilation in America Abigail Gabrieli

10 Horror in the Camps Pooja Podugu

14 Bodies on Screens Matt Shuham

20 The Fourth-Wave First Lady Osaremen Okolo

28 Sleeping Giants and Submerged Rocks Neil McCullough Purdy

FUNNY PAGES

WORLD

3 Obamacare 2148 Jay Alver

26 New Faces, Old Names Sarani Jayawardena

CAMPUS

30 “Hit by 700,000 Bullets” Nicolas Rossenblum

4

Just How Liberal Are Students?

Kim Soffen

6

After the Crisis Joe Choe

32 The Changing Face of Germany Francesca Annacchiarico

BOOKS & ARTS

UNITED STATES

34 Advertising 2.0 Kaitlyn Jeong

17 The Quest for Military Sexual Assault Reform Johanna Lee

36 America’s Sport Audited Anita Lo

23 Millennials’ Relationship with Democrats Kate Donahue

ENDPAPER 44 Best Years of Our Lives Andrew Seo

INTERVIEWS 41 Thomas Menino Erin Shortell 42 Mike McCurry Arjun Kapur

38 To Ferment and Foment Olivia Zhu Email: president@harvardpolitics.com. ISSN 0090-1032. Copyright 2014 Harvard Political Review. All rights reserved. Image credits: Photographer: Cover- Manaure Quintero; 42- Kelli Ryan. Wikimedia: 1- Mstyslav Chernov; 4- Thomas Steiner; 17- Israel Defense Forces, U.S. Army; 20- Chuck Kennedy; 34- Matt Wade. Flickr: 8- Danielle Helm; 14- Corey Velazquez; 32- Diederik Lambeek.

SUMMER 2014 HARVARD POLITICAL REVIEW 1

FROM THE PRESIDENT

HARVARD POLITICAL REVIEW

The Student Body

A Nonpartisan Undergraduate Journal of Politics, Est. 1969—Vol. XLI, No. 2

EDITORIAL BOARD PRESIDENT: Daniel Backman PUBLISHER: Olivia Zhu MANAGING EDITOR: Matt Shuham ASSOCIATE MANAGING EDITOR: Daniel Lynch ASSOCIATE MANAGING EDITOR: Gram Slattery STAFF DIRECTOR: Holly Flynn CAMPUS SENIOR EDITOR: Jenny Choi CAMPUS ASSOCIATE EDITOR: Taonga Leslie COVERS SENIOR EDITOR: Priyanka Menon COVERS ASSOCIATE EDITOR: Brooke Kantor U.S. SENIOR EDITOR: Colin Diersing U.S. ASSOCIATE EDITOR: Harry Hild U.S. ASSOCIATE EDITOR: Emily Wang WORLD SENIOR EDITOR: Matthew Disler WORLD ASSOCIATE EDITOR: Rachael Hanna WORLD ASSOCIATE EDITOR: Pooja Podugu B&A SENIOR EDITOR: Rachel Wong B&A ASSOCIATE EDITOR: Samir Durrani B&A ASSOCIATE EDITOR: Nancy Ko INTERVIEWS EDITOR: Gavin Sullivan HUMOR EDITOR: Jay Alver BUSINESS MANAGER: John Acton CIRCULATION MANAGER: Colin Criss DESIGN EDITOR: Ashley Chen MULTIMEDIA EDITOR: Johanna Lee ASSOCIATE MULTIMEDIA EDITOR: Joe Choe ASSOCIATE MULTIMEDIA EDITOR: Avika Dua WEBMASTER: Tom Silver WEBMASTER: Kim Soffen

SENIOR WRITERS Naji Filali, Sam Finegold, Zeenia Framroze, Tom Gaudett, Krister Koskelo, Eli Kozminsky, Joshua Lipson, Paul Lisker, Zak Lutz, Frank Mace, Arjun Mody, Max Novendstern, Andrew Seo, Ben Shyrock, Sarah Siskind, Ross Svenson, Simon Thompson, Beatrice Walton

STAFF Daniel Abarca, Francesca Annicchiarico, Humza Bokhari, Nicholas Bonstow, Rebecca Brooks, Olivia Campbell, Jaime Cobham, Samuel Coffin, Cansu Colakoglu, Tim Devine, Jacob Drucker, David Freed, Caleb Galoozis, Harleen Gambhir, Jonah Hahn, Barbara Halla, Richard He, Elsa Kania, Arjun Kapur, Shahrukh Khan, Ian Kohnle, Sandra Korn, Tyrik LaCruise, Andrew Ma, Blake McGhghy, Clara McNulty-Finn, Jacob Meisel, Jacob Morello, Osaremen Okolo, Andrea Ortiz, Meg Panetta, Valentina Perez, Anthony Pietra, Cory Pletan, Bryan Poellot, Ivel Posada, John Pulice, Ellen Robo, William Scopa, Erin Shortell, Wright Smith, Austin Tymins, Alec Villalpando, Celena Wang, Joy Wang, Matthew Weinstein, Carlos Xu, Carolyn Ye, Amy Zhan, Benjamin Zhou

ADVISORY BOARD Jonathan Alter Richard L. Berke Carl Cannon E.J. Dionne, Jr.

Walter Isaacson Whitney Patton Maralee Schwartz

2 HARVARD POLITICAL REVIEW SUMMER 2014

“No, you can’t touch my hair.”

Last month, a page on the social networking and blogging site Tumblr featuring pictures of black Harvard students holding whiteboards exploded in national media outlets. The page, a project of the “I, Too, Am Harvard” campaign, cast in stark relief some of the off-hand, often unintentional, racialized remarks and behaviors black students encounter on Harvard’s campus. From assertions that a black man’s Harvard application included merely a picture of his face to unwelcome attempts to “pet” a black woman’s hair “like an animal,” the experiences these photos recounted brought to light ways that the combination of skin color, physical features, and heritage that is race operates today, even on this liberal campus.

In many ways, the media campaign and accompanying student-written play succeeded. Later that month, for instance, Harvard College Interim Dean Donald Pfister and Incoming Dean Rakesh Khurana penned an email to the undergraduate community that referenced the play and promised to “continue the conversation” through events such as a town hall next semester.

“I, Too, Am Harvard” brought issues of race, identity, and belonging to the fore of campus discussion in no small way. More broadly, however, it illustrated an underappreciated aspect of politics: the politics of the human body.

When we talk about politics—the realm of peaceful, orderly discourse meant to substitute for humanity’s brutish state of nature—we often confine ourselves to the intellectual as distinct from the physical. What we miss, then, is the reciprocal relationship between physical experience and political existence.

In the case of “I, Too, Am Harvard,” students were responding to criticisms of affirmative action that associate physical appearance with academic or professional unworthiness. But just this semester at Harvard has seen other issues fraught with complex ties between the physical and the

political.

Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s selection as commencement speaker, for example, brought student criticism on account of the “stop-and-frisk” policing tactic he oversaw and defended in New York City, a policy found to unconstitutionally employ racial profiling. And perhaps no Harvard student went the first week of April without reading a student’s anonymous account of sexual assault and the administration’s shameful response. Indeed, what once seemed to some of us at the Harvard Political Revew an esoteric lens through which to view politics, the body has since become the site of central debates.

In “Body Politic,” the HPR expands its inquiry beyond Harvard to critically assess the politics of the human body in the United States, around the world, and in personal experience. Pooja Podugu takes us to the camps of Syrian refugees, where organ trafficking and rape thrive amidst political limbo. Abigail Gabrieli investigates the practice of genital mutilation of American intersex newborns, which remains legal despite human rights concerns. Drawing from historical lessons, Matt Shuham examines the American pornography industry’s contemporary moral debates. And an anonymous writer reflects on the popular political conceptions of anorexia in the context of her own experience.

Through an examination of the physical as political—alongside the articles in our Humor, Campus, United States, World, and Books & Arts sections—this issue exemplifies the HPR’s dedication to thorough, thought-provoking, and unique analysis of today’s issues. I encourage you to visit our website, www.harvardpolitics. com, for more of our latest work.

Daniel Backman President

FUNNY PAGES OBAMACARE 2148 Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose Jay Alver This February, the White House announced a further one-year delay of the Affordable Care Act’s mandate for medium-sized employers to provide health insurance for their employees. The ACA has been the source of a great deal of controversy ever since its passage in 2010 but, following this latest delay, some experts are beginning to doubt whether the legislation will ever be fully implemented.

Peter Helix, a conservative health policy analyst best known for spearheading the successful ballot initiative to ban teleportation in North Carolina, explained that the implementation of “Obamacare”—or, as he confusingly still calls it, the ACA—has become sort of a running joke in policy circles. “For years, conservatives argued that the constant delays were a source of uncertainty that would limit hiring,” Helix noted, his holopresence crackling slightly due to interference from a passing scramjet, “but after nearly a century and a half of postponement, the only certain thing is that it will keep being delayed. The president doesn’t want this mess on her hands, especially not with midterms coming up.”

Senator Matteo Henriquez-Obama (R-N.G.)—who is rumored to be forming an exploratory committee to seek his party’s nomination in 2148—seems to agree with this sentiment. “Newties hate the ACA,” Henriquez-Obama told the HPR (“Newtie” being a moniker adopted

by New Georgians in honor of their state’s founder), “and the president finally got the message from the working people of the swing state of New Georgia. The mandate would hurt my constituents in the lunar mining communities, which is why I’m fighting for more than just another

delay. We need #fullrepeal now.”

Members of the president’s own party have been cautiously supportive of this delay. “There are just a few kinks that need to be worked out, that’s all,” according to Rep. Charlie Rangel (D-N.Y.).

Rangel continued, “The 35th Amendment clearly states that the president has the authority to postpone the implementation of portions of the ACA, and if she chooses to do it, she can. I don’t remember any complaints from the right when the last 19 of their administrations delayed the employer mandate; it’s hypocrisy, pure and simple.”

In recent press events, President Chiao has appeared unwilling to comment on the ACA’s latest developments. When pressed for comment on the delay by a reporter from Buzzfeed-New York Times, Chiao hastily changed the subject to her

administration’s latest initiative to deal with the growing cloned mammoth problem in the Arctic states. At a later event, Press Secretary Randall Newton told reporters that the administration believed a “phase-in” process for the employer mandate was necessary. Newton then quickly shifted to other topics.

As the debate over the merits and motivations of the president’s decision continues, Congress remains incapable of finding a legislative solution to the ongoing controversy. Earlier this month, the House of Representatives passed the 1,208th bill repealing the ACA, but finding the 84 votes needed to achieve a filibuster-proof three-fifths majority in the Senate appears unlikely before Congress lets out for flood season.

SUMMER 2014 HARVARD POLITICAL REVIEW 3

CAMPUS

Just How Liberal Are Students?

In Cambridge, they don’t always push politics to the left.

Kim Soffen

College students in Cambridge don’t have the impact on City Hall that some think.

“I

f you’re not a liberal at twenty, you have no heart.”

While this famous saying may unfairly mock a young conservative’s ideology, it reflects a widely-accepted truth: young people, by and large, are liberal. And young, educated people—college students—are the most liberal of all.

This raises the question: what happens to local government when you take a hoard of well-educated young people and put them in one place? To what extent does the student population actually affect the college town’s local government, and how much of an effect is it perceived to have?

Since college students are overwhelmingly liberal (60 percent of 18- to 29-year olds supported Obama in 2012, compared to Romney’s 36 percent), it seems logical that their presence in a district would “blue-ify” it, increasing the Democratic

4 HARVARD POLITICAL REVIEW SUMMER 2014

tilt of the constituency. However, the case of Cambridge, Massachusetts, suggests that this conclusion is, perhaps surprisingly, false.

THE “BLUE-IFICATION” OF THE DISTRICT Cambridge is, by any standard, a college town, with the undergraduate populations of its residential undergraduate colleges—Harvard, MIT, and Lesley University—totaling 12,729 students, over a tenth of the city’s population. Of these 12,729 students, 11,518 are from the United States and presumably eligible to vote.

According to voter file analysis conducted by the HPR, 3,588 (31.15 percent) of these eligible student voters are registered to vote in Cambridge.

As a whole, Cambridge’s 65,078 registered voters are overwhelmingly liberal: 56.97 percent are registered Democrats, while only 4.41 percent are registered Republicans. What’s surprising, though, is that when students are removed from the equation, this disparity actually gets slightly greater, with 57.61 percent of non-students being registered Democrats and 4.28 percent being registered Republicans.

Therefore, on paper, students actually make Cambridge an incrementally more Republican district. The perception, however, is very different. Sietse Goffard, former chair of the Harvard Institute of Politics National Campaign committee, a nonpartisan organization that seeks to increase student involvement in politics, told the HPR, “If anything, [the student vote] will ‘blue-ify’ Cambridge because

CAMPUS

the majority of Harvard College students are Democrats. So statistically, registering more people will increase the number of Democrats.”

There are several reasons for this discrepancy between reality and perception. The most obvious explanation is the trend for young people to register as independents despite having liberal ideologies. In Cambridge, 46.51 percent of students are independents (more than the 45.87 percent who are registered Democrats), compared with 37.37 percent of non-students who are independents. The prevalence of liberal ideologies creates the perception that college students make the electorate more Democratic, and may indeed increase the share of votes for Democratic candidates and causes, but this is not reflected in actual party affiliations.

Another potential explanation for the discrepancy is the ubiquitous and highly visible student activism for liberal causes.

On a number of issues—everything from unionization rights to economic progressivism to fossil fuel divestment—the liberal voice is the loudest on campuses around Cambridge. Thus, it is easy to come to the conclusion that college students make Cambridge more liberal.

The final contributor to the gap between the perception and reality of students’ effect on the Democrat-Republican balance is Cambridge itself. Cambridge is overwhelmingly liberal. The students, who are also largely liberal, might make a small town in Texas or Kentucky more Democratic-leaning, but they have less impact on Cambridge’s massive Democratic population. Thus, the students’ liberal leanings only create a perception that they increase the proportion of Democrats. In reality, Cambridge was dark blue before current students arrived on campus. And while it’s possible that the city’s political leanings have historically been swayed by the presence of liberal college students, the most recent data shows non-student Cambridge residents are farther left than their student counterparts.

ROCKING THE VOTE While Cambridge students and other Cambridge residents may be similar in their party affiliation, they certainly still have different priorities. These are especially important when it comes to local government, where party lines are more blurred in favor of specific local needs than at the national level. Therefore, it is also important to explore whether college students have the ability to swing an election.

Of Cambridge’s 3,588 registered college student voters, 334, or 9.31 percent, voted in the 2013 Cambridge City Council elections. Three hundred thirty-four certainly is not many in the context of a town with a six-figure population, but is it enough to sway an election? In last year’s city council election, 334 votes certainly could have made all the difference.

In Cambridge City Council elections, voters rank the candidates, and the election is conducted in a run-off system to elect the nine people who receive the most votes. When electing nine councilors from a pool of twenty-five candidates, votes are so sparse that victory is decided by slim margins. The 9th- and 10th-place finishers in Cambridge’s most recent election, for example, were separated by only 14 votes, and the 7th and 10th by only 30.

With such small margins of victory, it is certainly conceivable

that a student bloc could have determined the outcome of the election. Students wouldn’t have had the power to unseat the top finisher (Leland Cheung, who received 2,392 votes), but a candidate who appealed to them could have pulled from 10th place into 9th and made it onto the council.

This is just the beginning of the power of the student bloc. If 27.35 percent of registered students voted—Cambridge’s overall average for the election—those 981 votes would be enough to catapult a candidate who received no non-student first-choice votes into 10th place after the first round of voting. This position would give that candidate a good chance at victory as, under Cambridge’s Single Transferrable Vote system, votes cast for candidates who have already cleared the threshold are reallocated to help other candidates. With just slightly above average turnout, the students could elect a representative to the council all on their own.

In the case of local elections, the reality is well-aligned with the common perception that, while students have the potential to change the outcome, they may not fulfill that potential. Goffard told the HPR, “We only have six thousand people, and Cambridge is a hundred thousand, so in the grand scheme of things, the voters we register don’t have a big impact on the election … but theoretically, they could.” Logan Leslie, a Harvard College sophomore and 2013 candidate for Cambridge City Council, concurred, telling the HPR, “In sheer numbers, they could be a voting bloc if they were on the same page. In practice, it doesn’t necessarily work that way.” Leslie Waxman, the assistant director of the Cambridge Election Commission, confirmed this perception: “Those precincts with the highest percentage of college dorms … have also had the lowest numbers of voters.”

WHY DO PERCEPTIONS MATTER? It is important to recognize that elected officials operate based on their perception of voters’ preferences, which may not reflect the reality. Sam Novey, director of partnerships at TurboVote, a start-up which aims to use the Internet to “make voting easy,” told the HPR, “Elections are as much about accountability as they are about decision making. … It goes into the calculus of what the officials do in their work and how they get reelected.

It’s not about whether [students] sway the election.” Rather, if students are perceived to swing elections, even if they don’t actually do so, elected officials will respond to their needs in hopes of winning their support.

The perceived impact of the student vote can even affect voting rights. Ahead of the 2012 election, Republicans proposed a variety of voting restrictions, such as making students ineligible to vote in their college districts, or requiring an in-state government-issued ID to vote. These were reportedly attempts to limit the college student vote, which Republicans perceived as disproportionately liberal.

College students have the capacity to effect governmental change, especially in those towns in which they make up a significant share of the population. However, their actual impact on elections is limited because they often do not bother showing up to vote at all. By voting in higher numbers and thus building the perception that they have the potential to sway an election, students could bring about desired changes in local government.

SUMMER 2014 HARVARD POLITICAL REVIEW 5

CAMPUS

AFTER THE CRISIS UNIVERSITY BUREAUCRACY AND THE STRUGGLE AGAINST SPECULATION Joe Choe

T

his past year saw a shooting at Purdue, bomb threats at Princeton and Harvard, and the Boston Marathon bombings in a metro area home to more than 60 institutions of higher learning. Administrators are trained to act quickly and thoroughly during these types of events, in order to ensure that the relevant constituencies are both informed and safe. But this is more challenging than it seems: the inherently collaborative decision-making culture in many colleges and universities is often too slow and deliberative, especially compared to the speed at which information, correct and incorrect, travels through the Internet today. In short, university bureaucracies cannot keep up with crises in the information age, and students are left in the gray area between certainty and fear, safety and vulnerability.

THE CULTURE CLASH Gerald Baron, a crisis manager whose clients include the U.S. Coast Guard, BP International, Boeing, and the University of North Carolina, told the HPR that “effective response management is completely contrary to the way that most universities operate on a day-to-day basis. They have a difficult time responding to crises because it doesn’t fit with their culture.”

Baron is referring to the fact that universities are collegial in nature, tending to encourage consultation and deliberation in committees, boards, and meetings before making any major decisions. The tension between this collegiality and the need for rapid communication is well outlined by Duke University’s Crisis Communication Plan, which describes their system in non-crises as one consisting of “multiple approvals before we

6 HARVARD POLITICAL REVIEW SUMMER 2014

distribute communications pieces, including emails and news releases.” However, the plan itself acknowledges that such a system will not work in a crisis. “Seconds matter in a crisis.”

Harvard’s own Crisis Management Team works with both the Harvard University Police Department and the Public Affairs and Communications Office. Members of these two bodies, along with the university administration, must be in constant deliberation with one another, while also processing information from the relevant outside sources, such as the Boston Police Department. Only after this procedure of prioritization and logistics is sorted out do the students receive information via MessageMe, which dispenses emergency notifications en masse via text messaging and social media.

This type of protocol is, in fact, mandated by the Clery Act, which requires schools to use an effective emergency response system and to issue “timely warnings” of campus threats.

However, some students told the HPR that timeliness is often a missing factor in the face of these crises. For example, Harvard senior Emily Lowe recalled that “the reaction to the [2013 Boston Marathon] bombing was slow in the sense that most of the initial information we were getting was coming out of the news outlets. I understand that, given the circumstances, the administration was getting information as quickly as possible, but the response was definitely a bit slower than I expected.” Students were forced to wait more than two hours between the first news report of the incident and the mass email sent by the administration, which merely acknowledged the bombings. Reflecting on Harvard’s response to the bombing, Dean of Freshmen Thomas Dingman acknowledged to the HPR that “we determined post-

CAMPUS

Cambridge police respond to Harvard’s December 2013 bomb threat.

incident that there were gaps in the reporting to the community.

More regular follow-ups would have been better.”

According to Gerard Braud, a crisis manager who worked with the federal government in the aftermath of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, “there is a slow pace of ivory tower decision makers, which can be partly attributed to the overwhelming fear that if they say something, they will say the wrong thing. Therefore, they say nothing.” As a result, any lack of information leads administrators to err on the safe side by remaining quiet until they can assess the crisis with more certainty and go through the proper school communications protocol. This process breeds uncertainty and speculation.

SPREADING RUMORS In the digital age, universities compete with the mainstream media and with eyewitnesses who use Twitter and Facebook to take control of the storyline themselves, while school administrators stall. The perils of social media were made evident during last year’s Boston Marathon bombings, when uncertainty and fear caused the users of the online social forum Reddit to wrongly accuse an innocent student of planting the bombs.

Social media poses a hefty challenge to administrators: during a university-related crisis, it successfully assuages worried minds by filling in the gap between the moment of the crisis and the moment of school-based communication. However, the filler information is often pure speculation. As Dingman warns, “rumors just take off. You have to be careful you are getting your information from the right source. It is too easy to assume that so-and-so is reliable.”

Social media has also wiped away time and distance barriers.

The ability to retweet, share, and up-vote posts allows incorrect information to spread quickly, and at a global scale. Braud told the HPR, “It’s not just speculation being repeated in that locale, it is people all over the world chiming in from all over the world

and retweeting false info.” It no longer matters if a crisis occurs at home or thousands of miles away. With social networks connecting people all over the world, any event can easily become national, or even global.

AWARENESS AND SAFETY Braud claims that problems arising from incorrect social media reporting can be averted if administrators are willing to give the media even a small amount of initial information. By doing so, the school can immediately take away both the media’s and eyewitnesses’ propensity to speculate.

Universities should, at the very least, be continually updating the public as they discover new information or developments during their process of discussions and consultations. Robin Hattersley, executive editor of Campus Safety Magazine, told the HPR that greater transparency can only help: “the missing link is greater awareness among students, faculty and staff. The more that campuses can involve everyone, the safer the campus.”

Rather than merely dispensing information after going through time-consuming protocols, universities can include the entire community in their updates at every step of the process.

According to Dingman, “what the Harvard administration does is try to be sure we are communicating as fully as allowed and expressing our concern about the safety and welfare of our own students. It is our job to bring as much peace and comfort [as possible].” Ultimately, however, only the continuous flow of speedy and accurate information can provide “peace and comfort” during crises. Universities must overcome the delays created by their collaborative nature and subdue harmful speculation by increasing the timeliness of responses and facilitating a continuous line of communication with their campus communities. Next time, whenever “next time” is, Internet speculation ought to give way to a well-informed, up-to-date administrative voice.

SUMMER 2014 HARVARD POLITICAL REVIEW 7

BODY POLITIC

REDEFINING ANOREXIA

Anonymous

E

very time I got into an Ivy League school, I allowed myself an apple.

Plus 90 calories. ***

The beautiful Kate Upton, airbrushed to perfection on the cover of Vogue, never bothered me. Nor did the ubiquitous tabloid articles about how thin Mary Kate Olson was getting. I never stared naked at my imperfections in the mirror or griped to myself about being “fat” or “ugly”—at least, no more than any other teenage girl did.

Yet there I sat on my living room couch in early 2012, feeling an overwhelming sense of accomplishment that I had made it to 7 p.m. without even the slightest desire to eat. I had attained complete control over my body, even its most basic instincts. In triumph, I grabbed my sneakers and headed out to the Y for my daily hour-and-a-half workout on the elliptical (which, according to an extensive spreadsheet I had created, burned slightly more calories than the treadmill).

Minus 1,000 calories.

As I headed home, I was still enthused by my extraordinary lack of hunger throughout the day. My pride was compounded by watching the other Y members start and finish their workouts while I was still going strong. I indulged in my usual post-workout meal, my only food for the day: Lean Cuisine herb roasted chicken, the lowest-calorie of any of the frozen dinners sold at my local grocery store.

I ate not because I was hungry, but because it was routine.

And I, if anyone, had the discipline to stick to a routine.

Plus 180 calories.

And then to the scale, the only way to objectively measure my

8 HARVARD POLITICAL REVIEW SUMMER 2014

self-control. I weighed myself compulsively, about fifteen times each day. On my worst days, I weighed myself before and after I peed, hoping the loss of liquid would bring down the number on the scale by a tenth of a pound.

This daily routine of massive calorie deficits and incessant weigh-ins continued ad nauseam for six months, with almost no deviation. I was addicted to the control. I was addicted to the pride. *** My story may read like a classic case of anorexia (it still feels weird to use that word to describe myself ), but it felt like anything but that. How, in the age of the Dove “Real Beauty” campaign and Jezebel repeatedly defending Lena Dunham’s nudity on Girls, with such a strong movement against eating disorders and toward female bodily empowerment, could I have slipped through the cracks so badly—without even identifying myself as a victim?

The problem for me was that these movements made eating disorders almost synonymous with poor body image. The image of a thin young girl looking into a floor-length mirror with a fatter version of herself staring back simply bore no resemblance to my experience. I had a fairly normal body image, so I never thought my tendencies qualified.

I was driven to these extremes not by body image but by a desire to exhibit ultimate control and discipline over myself—a desire to be the best.

In my senior spring, with college application season behind me and the drive to achieve on my high school coursework a distant memory, I refocused my Type A obsessiveness on food.

I had already gotten what everyone else desired academically: a

BODY POLITIC

perfect SAT score and a ticket to Harvard. Why couldn’t I do the same with diet and exercise?

I never considered what I was doing to be a problem, much less a disease; everyone else wished they had the discipline to exercise and to resist food to the extent that I did. It wasn’t until a full year after I returned to normalcy that I even realized I had been anorexic. *** High school graduation came and went, and a summer of world travel ensued. Amidst all the new sights and sounds of the Eastern Hemisphere, I was overwhelmed by the opportunities. I focused diligently on mapping out public transportation, scheduling sightseeing, picking up the language—working to make the most of my limited time abroad. Just as I had transitioned from obsessing about schoolwork to obsessing about food six months earlier, my Type A gradually shifted focus from food to my travel.

The habits began to fade away. I didn’t even notice that I had stopped.

Twelve months later, I was still without relapse. My freshman year provided more than enough moving pieces to control, so denying myself food was, like over the previous summer, unnecessary. It was only during the summer after my freshman year that I even realized I had ever had a problem.

I picked up a copy of Unbearable Lightness, a memoir by Portia de Rossi, for no other reason than that Portia was one half of each of my two favorite celebrity couples (Lindsay and Tobias Fünke in Arrested Development, and Ellen DeGeneres and Portia in real life). The book details her struggles with closeted homosexuality and anorexia, the latter brought on by a combination of body image issues, the need to control, and a desire to excel.

As I read and re-read the book, I gradually began to recognize Portia’s thoughts as my thoughts, her tendencies as my own. Near the end of my third or fourth read-through, it hit me: Oh shit. What had I done? This whole time, I had been striving to be the best, yet “achievement” and “disease” are not exactly synonyms.

Once I had recognized this diagnosis, I knew that controlling my eating habits could no longer fulfill my need to be disciplined and high-achieving. One does not exercise discipline in hopes of becoming diseased, nor mark that diagnosis as an accomplishment. One does not garner pride from a practice that sends people to therapy, or worse. And without the fulfillment of those needs, my self-destructive habits were worthless to me.

With this realization, I knew I could never go back. *** Had anorexia been portrayed as an issue of control and achievement, in addition to one of body image, I might have recognized my disorder earlier. Perhaps my family or friends would have recognized it. Had someone recognized my disorder, it might not have lasted as long as it did and might have done less harm to my body and my mental health.

We as a society need to expand our recognition of eating disorders. It is not always a young teenage girl who wrongly thinks she’s too fat. It can be a wrestler trying to make weight, a military brat looking for a sense of control as he keeps moving around the country, or a student plagued with depression,

anxiety, or a desire for self-harm. Or, in my case, it can be a highly-disciplined high school senior who needed a new domain to fulfill her obsessive desire to achieve.

It is not the cause that defines the disease, but the disease itself. All of these people can experience the hours lying awake in bed counting the day’s calories, the detachment from family and friends out of necessity to hide the new habits, shrugging off the “you look so good!” comments because they know it’s not good enough. Only when the movement against eating disorders portrays all causes of the disease as legitimate will these other victims and their loved ones begin to recognize their disorders and get help.

As with many of society’s ills, education is the key to achieving this progress. The American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5), the widely-recognized authority on mental illness diagnostic criteria, does not require poor body image in order to diagnose anorexia. Rather, a diagnoses of anorexia is based on “restriction of energy intake,” “persistent behavior that interferes with weight gain,” and “lack of recognition of the seriousness of the current low body weight.”

Although the DSM-5 does make allusions to body image—for instance, offering “disturbance in the way one’s body shape or weight is experienced” as an alternative to the third criterion—it is not portrayed as a requirement for the diagnosis, as our school curricula would have us believe.

Every health class I ever took featured the stereotypical image of the thin girl staring into the mirror as the face of anorexia—portraying her body image issues as the disease itself, not even as a cause thereof. And there was barely a word spoken about any other possible circumstances: “Well, boys can get it too … I guess.” So, why are we filling our textbooks—and our children’s minds—with the idea that body image is inseparably tied to eating disorders, given that the leading psychiatric authority doesn’t even think that is the case?

We must shift our message; rather than teaching children that distorted body image is anorexia, we must teach them the causes are as numerous and diverse as the victims, and that distorted body image is just one of those causes. Once our children begin to recognize this, the body empowerment movement will adapt. Eventually, other victims will be recognized, and the healing process can begin. *** I still find myself checking the clock each day when I get my first pang of hunger. I still occasionally skip a meal and bask in the glory of what my peers didn’t have the self-control to do. I still think about how easy it would be to go back, to regain control when the papers, problem sets, and exams make me feel like I’m losing it.

And yet, I don’t.

The recognition of my disorder has allowed me to overcome it, at least so far. And it is my hope that greater recognition of all causes of the disease—both those that are driven by body image and those that are not—allows all afflicted by it to recognize their disease and begin their recovery.

“Shame weighs a lot more than flesh and bone.” —Portia de Rossi

SUMMER 2014 HARVARD POLITICAL REVIEW 9

BODY POLITIC

HORROR IN THE CAMPS HOW SYRIAN REFUGEES LOST THE RIGHT TO THEIR BODIES

Pooja Podugu

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he civil war in Syria has passed its third anniversary, yet the situation in and around the nation remains dire. War persists, and the crisis endures, affecting approximately 2.5 million Syrian nationals who have been displaced from their homes into neighboring countries.

These innocent civilians—75 percent of whom are women and children and 1.5 million of whom are under the age of 18— arrive at refugee camps seeking shelter from the terrors they have escaped. Yet these oases of hope have become breeding grounds for dangerous and thoroughly underreported events that threaten the bodily sanctity of the refugees within them. Among the greatest threats to refugees are the systematic rape and sexual harassment of girls and women and a quickly growing organ trafficking market.

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Without widespread awareness of these issues, steps cannot be taken to reverse them.

TRAFFICKING HUMAN ORGANS Few, if any, official media outlets have conducted reports on the organ harvesting occurring within Syrian refugee camps. And yet, as the crisis has progressed, unofficial and firsthand testimonies of the practice have languished online, almost undetected. As of today, some experts and NGOs have recognized organ harvesting in refugee camps as a crucial issue, asserting that the illegal trade has picked up in recent months. Both Turkey and Lebanon are home to large organ crime rings, along with hundreds of thousands of refugees.

Looking at Lebanon specifically helps to elucidate the factors that make the flourishing of such a trade possible.

Over 800,000 Syrians have crossed the border into Lebanon seeking safety. This has grown the population of Lebanon, a country of about 4 million, by nearly 25 percent according to official reports from the United Nations. This influx of refugees has flooded the Lebanese labor market and placed severe economic strains on a nation already suffering from financial woes. Add a government whose restrictions and checks on the nation’s health care are close to zero, and the environment is perfect for organ smuggling and trade.

Unlike Jordan and Iraq, Lebanon has so far refused to establish true refugee camps for the Syrians, despite having the

BODY POLITIC

largest refugee influx of any country in the region. Instead, the refugees are forced to create their own nomadic camps, sleep in tents, and find any other shelter available to them in this alien country. A significant number have filled up Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley in a makeshift refugee community.

Thus, when the organ brokers pay visits to these communities of refugees, they find a mass of people seeking any opportunity to provide basic survival necessities for their families. Often in good health and desperate for a way to provide for their mothers and siblings, young refugees, generally between the ages of 15 and 25, are perfect donor parties in this organ trafficking system.

Brokers offer as much as $5,000 for one kidney. The choice is a simple one.

Although refugees are giving a certain measure of consent in entering the market, in reality, the system is more complex than can be accounted for in the literal definition of that term, “consent.” The World Health Organization, in conjunction with the U.N. Global Initiative to Fight Human Trafficking, determined in a 2009 study that consent that has been “obtained through varying degrees of coercion or abuse of vulnerability” no longer constitutes true consent. The study added that, “as with human trafficking for other exploitative purposes … victims of trafficking for the purpose of organ removal are often recruited from vulnerable groups (for instance, those who live in extreme poverty).”

According to an investigative study by the German news magazine Der Spiegel, after this quasi-consent is given (if it is given at all), the broker takes the individual to a makeshift secret clinic, keeping the refugee blindfolded to protect the clinic’s location. These clinics are strewn throughout Beirut in obscure warehouses and abandoned buildings. Once there, a surgeon arrives to perform the organ removal, often lying to the patient and claiming that his organ will grow back with time and sufficient bed-rest. The refugee returns to his “home” in the nomadic camp. Sometimes the money comes; sometimes it doesn’t.

The worst danger comes post-operation. Live organ donors, even in the best health care systems in the world, must seek follow-up care for at least a year following their operations. Painkillers are often prescribed and necessary in the initial weeks following the surgery. Instructions are necessary to inform the patient on how to care for and clean his wound, as are new bandages, gauze, and other equipment to insulate the wound from the outside world. In situations of poor hygiene, surgical wounds are particularly vulnerable to infection. Yet, in the case of these refugees, the Der Spiegel report finds, none of these necessities are ever offered to the organ donor post-operation. Refugees are taken back to their camps, told that everything will be fine, reassured that the money will arrive in a few days or weeks, and then, for all intents and purposes, abandoned.

SEXUAL HARASSMENT AND RAPE Though the growth of the organ trafficking trade appears dire and almost irreversible, it has, thus far, been limited in its scope.

Estimates suggest that 600 to 800 such operations have been performed on Syrian refugees over the past three years. While this is a sizable number, the practice has tended to fade into the

background of public consciousness—obscured by other, more widespread and systematic problems.

However, sometimes even the widespread and endemic problems escape media or public attention and, as a result, never achieve resolution. One such issue is the systematic rape and harassment of women and girls that has become prevalent in refugee camps around the region. This abuse often takes three forms: outright rape and harassment in the camps, the traditional practice of sham marriages, and domestic violence.

Rape and harassment have unfortunately become commonplace in the camps, with women reporting fears of using communal bathrooms alone or of wandering outside of their tents at night. According to a report by The Guardian, even the local owners of brothels and nightclubs have requested that the U.N send in officials to restrict the actions of the “gangs of young men” who “wreak havoc” in the camps and “harass women.”

Yet these attacks remain shrouded in layers of fear and shame, as the traditions of society in the region are deeply conservative. Women cannot come forward about the brutality to which they have been subjected, for fear of public shaming, social isolation, and accusations of impurity leveled by their peers. Sexual abuse severely lowers a woman’s chances of marriage later in life and, on the whole, separates her from society on the grounds of her supposed impurity. For this reason, even aid workers and clinicians from outside the region who have volunteered in the camps are often unwilling or hesitant to report the violence they have witnessed; the long-term consequences of publicizing the attacks could be just as harmful to the victims as the attacks themselves.

Dr. Manal Tahtamouni, director of the Institute of Family Health, a national NGO which has opened nine women’s clinics across Jordan to care for refugees, confirmed this in an interview with the HPR. She noted that “when dealing with women and families, it is not very common to see such cases [of rape], because women refuse to approach workers and report these attacks. This is because of social stigma and understanding the other consequences that could come from their rape.”

In keeping with the ultraconservative, traditionalist atmosphere of society and culture in the camps, the practice of sham marriages has also seen a dramatic increase over the past three years. In this practice, the “groom” (who usually hails from Saudi Arabia or another Gulf state) offers the family of the “bride” a sum of money—often enough for the family to sustain itself for several months—in exchange for the girl’s hand in marriage. In reality, however, the groom takes the bride for a short period— anywhere from a few weeks to a few months—sleeps with her, and then annuls the marriage, returning to his home country without her.

As the war drags on, and new crises spring up around the world, the amount of aid and time donated to the crisis in Syria has slowly started to shrink. “So much progress has been made over the past three years,” said Tahtamouni, “However, I know that we still need assistance other than what we are receiving now, which is all very general. We need more specific assistance.” The only way to truly guarantee that these problems can be resolved in the future is to place the crisis in the public eye.

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BODY POLITIC

GENITAL MUTILATION IN AMERICA THE TRAUMA OF INTERSEX NEWBORNS Abigail Gabrieli

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or the average American, the words “genital mutilation” conjure up images of babies in developing countries and of human rights advocates railing against horrors that take place on other continents. Genital mutilation seems barbaric, backwards, and very, very far away. And yet, there is an epidemic of nonconsensual genital mutilation in the Western world that receives little media or political attention.

Every day in hospitals in the United States, on average, a dozen intersex infants are subjected to genital mutilation. These babies are forced to undergo invasive, unnecessary, and damaging surgeries that can haunt them for the rest of their lives, simply because outdated medical protocols insist that only certain types of biological sex characteristics are correct. Intersex children’s conditions usually present no health risks; indeed, the surgery itself is often far more harmful. However, the lack of legal protections for the intersex community means that practices that the United Nations has

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deemed human rights violations are still commonplace in our hospitals.

INTERSEX CONDITIONS To be born intersex is to be born with a body that does not conform to the malefemale binary. Brown University professor Anne Fausto-Sterling defines an intersex individual as one who has a mixed set of sex characteristics: their genes, gonads, genitalia, secondary sex characteristics, and hormone patterns do not all fall into the same sex category. For instance, a baby born with de Chapelle syndrome would be intersex, as they would have a traditionally female XX chromosomal makeup and a penis.

There are many common myths about intersex people, including that they are hermaphrodites, suffer health hazards because of their condition, or are always transgender. These falsehoods have created a culture of misunderstanding that stigmatizes intersex children and deprives their parents of the legitimate

information they need to make informed healthcare decisions.

Intersex individuals are not “hermaphrodites.” True hermaphroditism— having both traditionally male and female genitalia—is not a condition that exists in humans. Instead, being intersex simply means that one’s sex characteristics do not all match the same binary sex, or that some of them are significantly smaller or larger than average.

Intersex conditions are also not necessarily harmful. A few intersex variations do entail health hazards; for instance, congenital adrenal hyperplasia often results in “salt wasting,” where one’s body is unable to retain enough sodium. However, intersex status usually confers no more significant health hazards than being “dyadic,” or non-intersex. There is nothing inherently wrong with intersex infants, psychologically or biologically. Indeed, as Hida Viloria, chair of the U.S. branch of the Organization Intersex International and an intersex individual herself, stated in an interview with the HPR, “people

BODY POLITIC

who haven’t had the surgeries at some point in their lives realize that their bodies are different, and they make do with it, the way everyone does with aspects of themselves that are different. And if they have supportive parents—or even just parents that are typically good parents—they tend to grow up exactly like other children.”

Moreover, intersex people are not necessarily transgender or non-binary. Indeed, many intersex individuals identify as female or male. However, some members of the intersex community are deprived, without their consent, of the opportunity to discover their own gender, of their bodily integrity, and even of their physical health.

The Intersex Society of North America estimates that one baby out of every hundred “differ[s] from standard male or female.” Of all these intersex babies, about 10 percent—that is, one for every thousand babies overall—undergo surgery to “correct” their sex

A VIOLATION OF HUMAN RIGHTS These surgeries are fundamental abuses of human rights. A report submitted to the United Nations General Assembly by the U.N. Special Rapporteur on Torture categorized such surgeries as among “abuses in health-care settings that may cross a threshold of mistreatment that is tantamount to torture or cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment.” They are medically unnecessary and, moreover, can be psychologically and physically damaging—inflicting mental torment, sterilization, and a loss of sensitivity upon intersex children.

These surgeries are primarily cosmetic and tend not to have any real health benefit. Many actually have significant negative health results: the removal of internal gonads that do not conform to external genitalia can render a child sterile for life, and procedures to “correct” ambiguous genitalia can cause scarring and desensitize organs.

The psychological effects can be similarly harmful. Viloria compared the trauma that intersex children can experience because of such surgeries to the trauma faced by childhood sexual abuse victims, saying, “There’s a constant attention to the genitals that is unwanted, invasive, and creates trauma.”

The surgeries can also create a nightmarish legal scenario years later for adults who realize that they were coercively assigned the wrong gender at birth. Attempts to transition back, to reverse this “irreversible” surgery, can require herculean legal and financial struggles.

Doctors frequently advise parents to provide consent as proxies for these surgeries when their children are very young. Some parents are even told by doctors not to tell their children about their intersex past in order to help them grow up “normally.”

Without compulsory disclosure, these children often speak of growing up knowing that something felt wrong without being able to tell what it was. Meanwhile, the stigmatization of the intersex community can make it hard for intersex activists to find parents and provide them with appropriate health information.

Legally, parents are currently allowed to sign for invasive and irreversible medical procedures that can have life-long negative effects on their children. With regard to female genital mutilation, advocates have long held that parents have no right to force

their children through such a procedure. In cases of intersex infants, however, the law seems to turn a blind eye to these children’s rights.

LEGAL STRIDES In the last few years, the intersex community has made some significant strides forward around the world and in the United States. Internationally, the U.N. report declaring intersex genital mutilation a human rights issue was hailed as a watershed moment by some activists. And Australia and New Zealand have passed laws that allow individuals to list their sex as “X” on their passports, saving intersex individuals from potentially dangerous situations while traveling.

The German government has enacted a similar piece of legislation, with one important design flaw: doctors can now list an “X” for sex on children’s birth certificates. Many intersex activists actually feel that this law represents a step backwards.

Viloria argues that much of the remaining legal and healthcare infrastructure has not been updated with the law and that the law itself now makes it difficult to list babies with ambiguous genitalia as “F” or “M.” As a result, parents now have a greater incentive to perform surgery on infants so that they can receive a dyadic sex marker on their birth certificates and have access to better healthcare.

According to Viloria, the German law essentially created a “requirement of a normalizing surgery.” Kimberly Zieselman, director for advancement at Advocates for Informed Choice, a major intersex activist organization in the U.S., also listed the possible “stigmatizing” or “outing” effect of either leaving the birth certificate blank or listing an “X” as an unintended negative consequence.

In the United States, change has followed a judicial rather than a legislative route. In a potentially groundbreaking case in North Carolina, AIC is helping the adoptive parents of a baby known as “M.C. Crawford” sue the state for performing intersex genital mutilation upon him while he was a ward of the state.

Preliminary hearings in the case have been promising, and Zieselman explained that, because the case involved state foster care and a state hospital, the adoptive parents had standing to sue in federal court, thus raising the issue of the constitutionality of intersex genital mutilation. “The right to bodily integrity, the right to privacy, the right to procreate … these are what’s really key,” she explained in an interview with the HPR.

A TIME FOR CHANGE Legal change is occurring for the intersex community, but not fast enough. Of the 370,000 babies born every day, about 3,700 will be intersex. These children will face immediate discrimination; a significant number of them will soon undergo unnecessary surgeries that violate their dignity and rights as human beings. “The biggest issue for the intersex community is this medically-sanctioned violence,” Zieselman stated simply.

Violaria agreed: “We are facing severe human rights abuses every minute of the day. What we most want, what we all agree on, is to stop the surgeries.”

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BODY POLITIC

BODIES ON SCREENS REPRESENTATION AND PUBLIC MORALITY

Matt Shuham 14 HARVARD POLITICAL REVIEW SUMMER 2014

BODY POLITIC

I

t’s been a bumpy few months for pornography in America.

In early September 2013, three performers in a row were “quarantined” within the industry after reportedly contracting HIV on the job. In a press conference, the performers—Cameron Bay and Rod Daily, along with Patrick Stone, who had also recently tested positive for HIV—gave an emotional plea for greater regulation of the porn industry, including more frequent testing and mandatory condom use. Poignantly, a fourth victim, John Doe, joined the press conference anonymously over the phone, in order to avoid industry backlash. In December, an anonymous actor with a positive HIV test again brought the industry to its knees.

These few months brought to a head one of the great tensions that pornography represents in America. An industry lobby argued that condoms were bad for business, and that performers often opted instead for twice-a-month STD testing. However, veteran performers from around the industry fought back: if the pornography industry really cared about their health, it would require condom use.

Performer safety has always been an issue in the industry.

Recently, though, organizing efforts to combat dangerous conditions have begun gaining steam. Back in 2010, Jenna Jameson called for a performers’ union to advocate for testing and protection regulations; in late 2012, the voters of Los Angeles County, America’s porn capital, voted to require condom use on set. Still, problems remain: large studios often simply ignore the new law, and performers fear an industry blacklist if they insist on protection. Meanwhile, outbreaks of sexually transmitted infections— including HIV, gonorrhea, and syphilis—continue.

This tension between performers and industry executives illustrates a larger tension, with implications beyond simple workplace regulation. According to a June 2007 paper from the Centers for Disease Control, industry standards affect the general public: “[t]he portrayal of unsafe sex in adult films may also influence viewer behavior. In the same way that images of smoking in films romanticize tobacco use, viewers of these adult films may idealize unprotected sex.” The industry doesn’t owe safety to performers alone; it has an obligation to members of the general viewing public, who are unquestionably influenced by what they see on the screen.

This sentiment—that what we see on the screen dictates in large part how we will behave—has been present since the invention of moving pictures. Herein lies the fluid boundary between the bodies of performers and the bodies of viewers, between the responsibilities of the entertainment industry and the vulnerabilities of its consumers.

“ONE SOLID YEAR IN NEW YORK” Nearly 100 years before the CDC report, Traffic in Souls fired a bold shot into the then-vacant battlefield of free speech, sex, and public morality. The film, which capitalized on a panic surrounding a supposed rise in forced sex slavery, follows the story of young women in New York City as they fall victim to charming men, who seduce them and then put them to work as nameless “madams” in brothels around the city. By the end of the film, the women are safe, and the brothel owners are in ruins.

In the real world, there were very few cases of so-called “white slavery,” officially documented or anecdotal. Still, the fear was there: immigration from “non-white” countries in Eastern Europe and Asia had peaked, and xenophobia was nearly a state religion. Audiences flocked to see Traffic in Souls to indulge their worst fears: not only seeing a young white woman wake up (after a drugged kidnapping) in a brothel, but seeing her wake up in a brothel and be instructed to put on a kimono.

Audiences flocked to see the film—one of the first full-length features of its day in America—because of a mantra Hollywood has since come to realize more fully: sex sells. Even though there was never any nudity or sex in the film itself, its advertisements made the most of the provocative content that was present—featuring women caught in compromising or vulnerable positions, or whips about to crack down on kidnapped victims. The film was banned in several states, but it still managed to have one of the most successful opening weekends in American history to that date, making $450,000.

But Traffic in Souls also marked an important recognition of film as a social tool, an engine through which massive numbers of vulnerable viewers could be influenced. At the time of its premier, the film received a mix of reviews, though all acknowledged the controversy it had created. The Sunday Times, in one representative example, claimed that, although the film presented sex, “all offensiveness and suggestiveness has been rightly eschewed.” Meanwhile, the film’s producers claimed that “the whole subject [of forced prostitution] is one which requires proper ventilation in order that the necessary volume of public opinion may be created to lead to the elimination of the evil.”

This statement aptly summarized the central talking point at the time: the film was important because it brought attention to a problem in society that ought to be fixed, and the public needed instruction on what to think and feel about it. It was propaganda, for a worthy cause. Still, many thought that the crowds of people spilling into nickelodeons weren’t prepared to respond to the immorality of such films. What if, far from accepting the social critique that the film claimed to put forth, audiences were simply encouraged to emulate the deviant sexual behavior they saw on the screen?

“WHOLESOME ENTERTAINMENT FOR ALL THE PEOPLE” Enter Daniel Lord. He and Martin Quigley, both devout Roman Catholics, observed what they saw as the degenerative effect of motion pictures on the public mind and sought to fight it. At the time, Catholicism was one of America’s strongest moral arbiters. Lord sought to tap into the broad community of American Catholics concerned about film, and specifically, about what their children would learn from it. In a pamphlet, Lord—himself an actor and storyteller almost singly credited with inspiring the Catholic faith of young people in early 20th-century America—spoke directly to his concerned confederates: “It is no longer a matter of a single scene being bad, of occasional ‘hells’ and ‘damns’ or girls in scanty costumes,” he said, but “a whole philosophy of evil … depicted with an explicitness that [has] excited the curiosity of children and the emulation of morons

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BODY POLITIC

This sentiment—that what we see on the screen dictates in large part how we will behave—has been present since the invention of moving pictures.

and criminals.”

Hollywood could not be trusted: it was too enticing a path toward sin. The bodies of actors portraying this sin were not only theirs; they were ours, too. Entertainment owed a public debt of decency.

Thus, in 1930, the “Hays Code”—named after Postmaster General Will Hays, but authored primarily by Lord—went into effect. Just a few decades after the very first film, the industry opted to regulate itself rather than risk harsh congressional action due to Catholic pressure. The code was a harsh dictate (by today’s standards) of precisely what could and could not be shown in theaters. After all, it claimed, “[m]ankind has always recognized the importance of entertainment and its value in rebuilding the bodies and souls of human beings. But it has always recognized that entertainment can be of a character either helpful or harmful to the human race.” The motion picture industry, then, had to consciously choose between “entertainment which tends to improve the race, or at least to re-create and rebuild human beings exhausted with the realities of life; and entertainment which tends to degrade human beings, or to lower their standards of life and living.”

It didn’t stop at the Hays Code: at every major technological shift in the entertainment industry, we have been reminded of the importance with which we should consider the fate of those bodies on screen. The Comics Code Authority of the 1950s was based loosely off the motion picture code two decades its prior.

It contained roughly the same off-limits topics, too: lawlessness, gore, sexual innuendo, and certain challenges to authority. Comic books changed in the same way as film. Characters dressed more conservatively. Batman lost his gun. Wonder Woman was a pacifist at heart.

10 years later, read Newton Minow, chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, to the assembled members of the National Association of Broadcasters: “Your industry possesses the most powerful voice in America … It should be making ready for the kind of leadership that newspapers and magazines assumed years ago, to make our people aware of their world …

[Just] as history will decide whether the leaders of today’s world employed the atom to destroy the world or rebuild it for mankind’s benefit, so will history decide whether today’s broadcasters employed their powerful voice to enrich the people or debase them.”

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CENSORSHIP AS PROGRESS And in magazines, and in social media, and in video games, and in everything else. Time and again, America is confronted with the same fundamental question: what effects do those ‘representative’ bodies—and what happens to them—have on viewers? Has the devaluation of life in violent videogames made us more violent? Do lax laws surrounding hate speech on the Internet promote a more aggressive, offensive discourse?

Still, these sorts of discussions aren’t always fire and brimstone. Perhaps ironically, the conversations around bodies and sex in pornography are perhaps the most forward-thinking of any entertainment medium. In Cindy Gallop’s 2009 TED Talk “Make Love, Not Porn,” for example, she asserts, “In an era where hard core porn is more freely and widely available on the Internet than ever before, and where kids are therefore able to access it at a younger and younger age than ever before, there is an entire generation growing up that believes that what you see in hardcore pornography is the way that you have sex.”

Gallop’s statement encapsulates all the keywords from a century of proclamations concerning public morality. Just like Daniel Lord, Newton Minow, and the Comics Code Authority before her, she is in effect saying: ‘entertainment is teaching children a lifestyle for which our progressive society ought to have very little tolerance. What we need, therefore, are institutional bounds and regulations to ensure that the bodies represented on the screen capture the values we wish to recreate in real life.’

This self-censorship is a fascinating process that marks a transition (for better or worse) in any medium. Whether in film censorship, condom use, video game ratings, or “family settings,” the viewing public often imposes its own morality on the bodies it sees on the screen, for fear that those bodies—if left unregulated—will have an undue negative influence on them and on their children. That this morality is in the public interest is assumed almost on its face: issues of public morality are truly democratic.

Still, this most recent turn toward a more realistic and safe depiction of intimacy, even in an industry sometimes considered shameful by its own customers, offers an interesting question: as a country, can we finally talk about sex?

UNITED STATES

THE QUEST FOR MILITARY SEXUAL ASSAULT REFORM

Johanna Lee

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rian Lewis, a former Navy petty officer third class, was raped by a superior non-commissioned officer, then ordered by his commander not to report the crime. Afterwards, Lewis was misdiagnosed with a personality disorder and given a general discharge. Filing retaliation claims proved unsuccessful.

Lewis was the first male survivor of military sexual trauma to testify before Congress regarding the issue of sexual assault in the military. Unfortunately, his story is all too common. According to a report by the Department of Defense, an estimated 26,000 service members were sexually assaulted in 2012—a 37 percent increase from the previous year. An estimated 86 percent of victims chose not to report the crime, many out of fear of retribution. Only 2,558 victims filed an unrestricted report, while only 302 proceeded to trial.

The military justice system prosecutes a smaller percentage of reported sexual assault cases than civilian courts. According

to research by Cassia Spohn, professor of criminology and criminal justice at Arizona State University, civilian courts prosecute 50 percent of sexual assault cases, compared to 37 percent by military courts. An Associated Press analysis of sexual assault cases on military bases in Japan from 2005 to 2013 found that, of 244 recorded punishments, only one-third of offenders were incarcerated. In 21 cases, the offenders were simply given a letter of reprimand.

The underreporting of sexual assault and the all-too-light punishments for convicted offenders are problems compounded by the pervasiveness of backlash against victims who do file reports. Many survivors explain that they are met with retribution for speaking out. In an interview with the HPR, Nancy Parrish, president of the military sexual assault survivors advocacy group Protect Our Defenders, said, “The victim is often victimized twice—once when they are raped and then when they are disbelieved or retaliated against. Too many victims are discharged due

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UNITED STATES

to minor infractions or being diagnosed with an errant medical diagnosis, such as personality disorder.” In fact, according to POD, 47 percent of victims who chose not to report the sexual assault did so out of fear of retaliation.

In response, Congress has attempted to reform the military justice system. These efforts began with Senator Kirsten Gillibrand’s (D-N.Y.) Military Justice Improvement Act and Senator Claire McCaskill’s (D-Mo.) response, the Victims Protection Act of 2014. On March 6, MJIA was filibustered, while VPA cleared the Senate on March 10. Although VPA’s passage represents an important step, Gillibrand and other proponents of MJIA argue that the situation remains dire and cannot be resolved without further serious efforts.

AN UNDERESTIMATED CRISIS The issue of sexual assault in the military is even more serious and complex than it seems. According to a report by the Center for American Progress, the Department of Defense may have underestimated the number of sexual assaults in 2012.

First, the estimate of 26,000 victims does not include sexual assaults that took place at service academies, where sexual violence may be more common. Second, the DoD survey does not count “less serious” sexual misconduct, called “unwanted gender-related behavior.” Eight percent of surveyed women in the military reported such behavior, including quid pro quo situations in which job security or career advancement threats were used to pressure them into engaging in sexual acts. Third, the data only considers crimes committed by military personnel against active-duty personnel, not against civilians such as intimate partners or minors on military bases. Lastly, the data is based on the number of victims, rather than the number of perpetrators. This may understate the scope of sexual violence: according to the survey, 26 percent of victims report that they were sexually assaulted by multiple offenders. Moreover, the survey does not consider repeated sexual abuse against a victim by one perpetrator or multiple assaults against a victim by various perpetrators.

Contrary to common assumptions, military sexual assaults affect at least as many military men as women. According to a report by the Veterans Health Administration, the majority (54 percent) of the 26,000 estimated military sexual assault victims in 2012 were male, equaling about 14,000 male survivors. In 2003, over 30,000 of the VHA’s male patients suffered “military sexual trauma,” and by 2010, nearly 50,000 male patients did. Moreover, men tend to report assault less frequently than women. Female victims accounted for approximately 88 percent of the report filings. At the same time, it is important to recognize that sexual assault in the military disproportionately affects women. Over 20 percent of women in the military reported unwanted sexual contact, according to a 2013 DoD survey.

MILITARY REFORM EFFORTS In order to curb the incidence of sexual assault, military academies incorporate sexual harassment and assault prevention training programs into their curricula. According to United States Military Academy sexual assault response coordinator Laureen Barone, students at West Point receive training on sex-

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ual harassment and assault prevention and take courses related to the issue. Another component of the education program is Cadets Against Sexual Harassment/Assault, a grassroots program in which cadets openly discuss different topics relating to sexual harassment and assault.

Moreover, the discourse at military academies may be opening up with regard to sexual assault. Lissa Young is a West Point graduate, a former career Army aviator, and currently a professor at West Point. In an interview with the HPR, she said that the issue of sexual assault “was talked about with much discomfort back when I was here [at West Point], but now … folks are much more willing to embrace it—to identify … and eradicate the root causes. It’s definitely a part of the organization’s culture of dialogue.”

In addition to incorporating prevention training into its academies, the military has demonstrated some willingness to institute procedural reforms. Maia Goodell is a former Navy officer, a leading member of the advocacy group Service Women’s Action Network, and a supervising attorney at MFY Legal Services. In an interview with the HPR, Goodell suggested that the military is not resisting reforms altogether. She cites reforms undertaken by the Air Force Academy—an institution plagued by sexual assault scandals in recent years—including the creation of the Special Victims’ Counsel Program to provide victims with legal counsel.

A CALL FOR CHANGE In March 2013, Gillibrand led a congressional hearing, hosted by the Senate Armed Services Committee’s Subcommittee on Personnel, to investigate the pervasiveness of sexual assault.

Since then, she has been advocating for the passage of MJIA. The bill has garnered bipartisan support: among its 55 co-sponsors are Republican senators such as Ted Cruz (R-Texas) and Rand Paul (R-Ky.). In addition, advocacy groups such as Parrish’s POD and Goodell’s SWAN have endorsed the bill. Goodell praised MJIA as “a much-needed reform to the military justice system,” expressing hope that it “will make victims more likely to come forward about sexual assault.”

The most substantial difference between MJIA and McCaskill’s VPA concerns the placement of convening authority— the power to decide whether to bring a complaint to trial. MJIA would move convening authority out of the hands of the victim’s unit commander and into the hands of specially-trained prosecutors who would be within the military but outside the involved parties’ chain of command. This could resolve the problem of bias and remove potential conflicts of interest.

As long as commanders retain convening authority, Gillibrand and groups like POD and SWAN argue, the U.S. military justice system will remain unable to effectively address the problem of sexual assault. The DoD report reveals that 25 percent of female and 27 percent of male victims indicated that their assailant was someone in their military chain of command. The commanders may prove biased, especially if they have close ties to the accused or if the victim’s rank is lower than that of the accused. They may also sweep potential conflicts under the rug in order to maintain cohesion within their units. Moreover, reports of sexual assault may negatively impact the commanders’ own careers, giving them a personal interest in covering up the crime.

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In addition to potentially being biased, the commanders who possess convening authority lack legal expertise. Finally, the process lacks transparency: there is no way to track commanders’ convening authority records in order to hold them accountable for their decisions.

Based on his personal experience with sexual assault, Lewis feels strongly that convening authority should be taken away from unit commanders. In an interview with the HPR, he argued, “Any system of justice where one officer is playing all of the major roles in the judicial process is bound to fail. There’s no independence or oversight in the decision-making.”

RESISTANCE TO CHANGE The military has been highly resistant to change. According to Parrish, “the military still chooses to deal with [the issue of sexual assault] as a public relations problem instead of finding a solution that goes to the heart of the matter.” Opponents of MJIA see the bill as a threat to the military chain of command.

Opinion on the issue is not split along gender or party lines.

Instead, the political arena divides along lines of seniority.

Young expressed her personal qualms about taking the authority out of commanders’ hands: “For me, it’s uncomfortable because it’s so fundamental for leaders to be responsible for what their units do and do not do.”

Critics of MJIA have also questioned the efficacy of removing convening authority from commanders. In January, the Response Systems to Adult Sexual Assault Crimes Panel, created by Congress and Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel, released a report on Gillibrand’s bill. According to the report, “the evidence does not support a conclusion that removing authority to convene courts-martial from senior commanders will reduce the incidence of sexual assault or increase reporting of sexual assaults in the Armed Forces.” Seven of the nine panelists agreed with this conclusion.

McCaskill shares their view, arguing that convening authority should rest with commanders, not with prosecutors. Thus, VPA merely strengthens prosecutors’ role in advising commanders in their convening decisions. Another major provision of the bill bans the use of the “good soldier defense,” which allows defendants to use their soldierly conduct as proof of their innocence.

TAKING THE HILL

between the two Democratic women indicates, opinion on the issue is not split along gender or party lines. Instead, the political arena is divided along lines of seniority, with older senators more likely to oppose MJIA and younger senators more likely to support it. This may be due to junior senators’ greater willingness to change the status quo and challenge traditional sources of authority.

Despite considerable support for MJIA, Gillibrand has been unsuccessful in passing the bill. At the end of 2013, Congress passed the 2014 National Defense Authorization Act, which included reforms such as providing victims with legal counsel and criminalizing retribution against victims who report crimes.

However, the bill did not include Gillibrand’s proposal, which was strongly criticized by the Pentagon and many legislators.

President Obama has also failed to support Gillibrand’s bill, only acting to initiate a yearlong review of sexual assault in the military.

With 55 senators voting in favor and 45 against, the Senate fell short of the 60-vote threshold required to invoke cloture and end the filibuster of MJIA. Opponents of the bill included McCaskill and Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman Carl Levin (D-Mich.). By contrast, McCaskill’s bill passed 97-0 in the Senate a few days later. The bill must now be approved by the House of Representatives and may take months to be enacted into law.

However, Lewis believes that McCaskill’s reform efforts are misguided and too slow. Lewis argued that McCaskill “really misunderstood what … survivors wanted. … Her bill does not comprehend the military justice system.” He added that “she is attempting to address this in an incremental fashion, and unfortunately incremental changes are still leaving us with 26,000 survivors every year and an untold number of survivors over the past fifty years.”

THE WAY FORWARD

While Gillibrand voiced her disappointment with the Senate’s failure to pass MJIA, she has vowed to continue fighting to protect military sexual assault survivors, including trying to attach her bill to the 2015 National Defense Authorization Act. Young remains optimistic regarding the prospects for reform: “I think it’s a tragedy, but it’s not unfixable. It’s not hopeless. I believe in the Army’s commitment to its soldiers.” Both Parrish and Goodell agree: Parrish claimed that “it’s just a matter of time before this changes,” and Goodell asserted that the military is “finally beginning to recognize and name this problem.”

It is important to keep in mind the purpose of reforming the military justice system: the assurance of justice to both past and future survivors. As Lewis explained, “There are two parts: the people who will come after us and those who have already walked this trail.” In an interview with Politico, Parrish called McCaskill’s bill “an important change and absolutely necessary.” Yet much work remains to be done. Despite the filibuster of MJIA in the Senate, its advocates continue to push for more fundamental reform of the military justice system. The battle will be arduous, but with so much at stake, hopes are high that action will be taken in the years to come.

Gillibrand’s bill has faced stiff competition from McCaskill’s more moderate alternative. Interestingly, as the disagreement

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The Fourth-Wave First Lady Osaremen Okolo

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“You see, at the end of the day, my most important title is still 'mom in chief.' My daughters are still the heart of my heart and the center of my world.”

- MICHELLE OBAMA, SEPTEMBER 2012

“T

alk about strange bedfellows!” exclaimed Myra Gutin in an interview with the HPR. Gutin, an historian of first ladies and professor at Rider University, was responding to First Lady Michelle Obama’s recent declaration that Jacqueline Kennedy and Eleanor Roosevelt are the two first ladies she strives most to emulate. Gutin then reiterated what most with a bare bones knowledge of U.S. history already know: “Mrs. Roosevelt and Mrs. Kennedy are pretty far apart.”

In most of her actions as first lady, Obama is caught between the worlds represented by the two women she chose out of our nation’s 46 first ladies. A Princeton graduate and Harvardeducated lawyer who publicly declares herself “mom in chief,” Obama must meet two different sets of expectations. One set comes from those who expect her to perform the more traditional, family-oriented role of first lady—the Jacqueline Kennedy model—and the other from those who seek an activist first lady in the mold of Eleanor Roosevelt or Hillary Clinton.

Perhaps inevitably, the attempt to juggle these roles has marked Obama a failure in the eyes of many, particularly those who wish she would more aggressively embrace the role of activist first lady. This group’s expectations were initially quite high: in an October 2008 USA Today article, Gutin argued that Obama “is a very capable, articulate, bright woman and most likely is going to be an activist first lady.” Gutin and others who agreed with her drew hope from the precedent set by Hillary Clinton, the sense of social change that accompanied the Obamas’ entrance into Washington in January 2009, and Obama’s own high-powered career.

This group has been largely disappointed and is increasingly vocal in its concern. Most notably, Michelle Cottle penned an article in Politico Magazine entitled “Leaning Out: How Michelle Obama became a feminist nightmare.” While Cottle insists that she would never have used such an incendiary title (her editors made the decision), she was far from alone in her message: Obama’s almost exclusively motherly image and focus on noncontroversial issues during her husband’s tenure makes her bad for American feminism. Likeminded critics, mostly women, read books like Lean In, a guide to women’s workplace empowerment written by Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg, and conclude that their first lady hasn’t been “leaning in” enough to be considered a feminist.

However, these critics may be missing a crucial success of Obama’s tenure as first lady. In maintaining an awareness of her race, following her own instincts, and sticking to her distinct personality, she has been able to supersede the norms and expectations of what a progressive first lady should do and cultivate her own brand of fourth-wave feminism.

RACE AND MICHELLE OBAMA As rebuttals to Cottle’s article have often noted, Obama must grapple with an undeniable aspect of her identity that sets her apart from many American women. Many of the commentators who have defended Obama believe that the challenges posed by her identity as a black woman should inform our understanding and evaluation of her tenure as first lady far more than her gender. In that light, Cottle’s critique misses the constraints and challenges unique to the first black first lady.

Obama is a woman who is intuitively aware of herself—and of her race. In an interview with the HPR, Jodi Kantor, New York Times journalist and author of The Obamas, revealed that the first lady herself has told aides that she is scrutinized more for her clothing choices than a white first lady would be. In constructing her image with a focus on domestic and motherly concerns, Obama may well be responding to the additional pressure created by her historic role as the first black first lady.

Americans, whether they say so or not, are also intuitively aware of Obama’s race—and some still hold her to a different standard because of it. Consider the reaction when Obama rebuffed a heckler at a fundraiser last summer. The heckler, gay-rights activist Ellen Sturtz, said, “She came right down in my face. I was taken aback.” Observers—many from the Left—took to Twitter to cite the first lady’s reaction as unnecessary, even rude. PolicyMic’s Lauren Rankin, who chronicled the incident, later argued that “the response has revealed the troubling reality that if you’re a strong, independent, educated, empowered black woman, you are held to a different standard.” Thus, it is possible that Obama declined to embrace the activist mantle of Hillary Clinton in part because she felt America was not ready for a black woman in that mold. As Rankin accurately noted, the fact that Sturtz was “taken aback” implies an obvious discomfort with Obama’s boldness in speaking to her.

Alternatively, some have argued that Obama seeks not only to avoid being characterized as an “angry black woman” but also to reinforce a positive and under-emphasized image of a strong, 21st-century, American black family. In an open letter addressed to Cottle and featured on her self-titled television show in November 2013, MSNBC’s Melissa Harris-Perry explained: “[W] hen she calls herself mom-in-chief, she is rejecting a different stereotype—the role of Mammy. She is saying that her daughters—her vulnerable, brilliant, beautiful black daughters—are the most important thing to her. The first lady is saying, ‘You, Miss Ann, will have to clean your own house, because I will be caring for my own.’”

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THE FOURTH-WAVE FIRST LADY Still, perhaps the crucial distinction is not Obama’s race, but the fact that she turned 50 years old in January, not 60 or 70.

Liza Mundy, author of Michelle, believes that to be both professionally successful and a proud “mom in chief” is characteristic of Obama’s generation. In an interview with the HPR, Mundy contrasted this with the previous generation—the Hillary Clinton generation—of working women who “couldn’t even have photos of their kids on their desks, had to prove their professional credentials, and really downplay their family commitments and be careful not to describe themselves as moms.”

First-wave feminism garnered the 19th Amendment. The second-wave feminism of the 1960s through the 1980s saw women entering the professional workforce and, in many ways, trading their aprons for pantsuits. “Third-wave feminism,” coined in 1992 by Rebecca Walker, a young African-American bisexual woman, takes care to incorporate all the diverse voices of the movement, including non-white women and non-straight women.

Obama, on the other hand, belongs to a generation of fourthwave feminists who see themselves as free to focus more on family life and traditional feminine roles, while still implicitly embodying professional success and power. While Cottle analyzes Obama through a second-wave lens, and Harris-Perry pigeonholes her into a third-wave framework, Obama herself personifies a fourth-wave conception of feminism. In this model of feminism, women do not need to appear a certain way in public to earn respect. Power can be wielded privately if that is what a woman chooses.

A fourth-wave-feminist understanding of Obama changes—

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but does not negate—our understanding of her as a powerful force in American politics. Kantor draws a key distinction: “She doesn’t engage that heavily with the work of the administration, but she is deeply engaged with what her husband is doing as president ... behind the scenes.” A fourth-wave feminist can choose to have an informal advisory role without setting feminism back. Kantor believes that Obama “cares deeply about” her husband’s initial mission to be a change agent in Washington and in some ways strives behind closed doors to protect the authenticity of that vision. As Kantor concludes, “it’s personal between the two of them.”

Seen in this light, Obama’s focus on her family and her role as “mom in chief” may reflect not only political considerations but also what truly interests her. For example, Mundy does not believe that Obama was ever very career-driven, even before entering the White House. She explains that the Princeton student Obama probably went to law school because it was a cultural norm for graduates at the time: Obama and her brother, Craig Robinson, “had come from a very working-class household, and they were the first generation of African-Americans who had access to things like corporate law and Wall Street.”

As a fourth-wave feminist, Obama can be her own version of Eleanor Roosevelt—a private, well-educated force who does care, and who takes the management of her first-ladyship into her own hands. At the same time, Obama—with toned arms, well-coifed hair, and a floral-print dress—can perform the “mom in chief” role reminiscent of Jackie Kennedy. The duality does not make her any less of a woman, African-American, mother, or wife. If anything, Michelle Obama’s choices as first lady and the complexity of her persona are her defining characteristics.

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IT'S COMPLICATED MILLENNIALS' RELATIONSHIP WITH DEMOCRATS

Kate Donahue

I

n 2008, Barack Obama swept into office with two-thirds of the millennial vote, bringing with him strong Democratic majorities in the House and Senate. In 2012, millennials turned out and voted for Obama at roughly the same rate, helping make his reelection possible. Since the election, however, there has been a decided downturn in support for Democrats among Americans ages 18 to 29.

Last semester, the Harvard Public Opinion Project released results showing that only 41 percent of millennials approved of Obama’s performance as president; furthermore, only 31 percent of those ages 18 to 24 identified as Democrats. Both of these numbers are the lowest HPOP has recorded in the past four years. This effect extends beyond Obama. In the 2013 Virginia gubernatorial race, Democratic victor Terry McAuliffe won only 45 percent of the millennial vote, not significantly greater than Republican Ken Cuccinelli’s 40 percent. As the 2014 midterm elections approach, results like these are helping to stoke fears (or raise hopes) that millennials are losing faith in Democrats.

“There’s nothing to say young people are born Democratic,” reminded John Della Volpe, director of polling at Harvard’s Institute of Politics, in an interview with the HPR.

A COMING-OF-AGE PROBLEM? A recent Pew report entitled “Millennials in Adulthood” explores one potential explanation for the decline in millennials’ support for Obama and the Democrats. The report examined the results of a telephone survey conducted earlier this year and noted that Obama’s approval ratings plummeted from 70 percent in the “honeymoon months” of early 2009 to 49 percent in January and February of 2014. It also found that portions of the

millennial generation vote differently depending on the performance of the president in office when they came of age.

Following the Pew report, The Washington Post published an article titled “Democrats Have a Young People Problem Too.” In it, George Washington University political scientist John Sides argued that Democratic support has eroded among younger millennials in recent months. Sides echoed the hypothesis proposed

by Pew: the president and the party in power at the time a voter comes of age matter for the voter’s future voting patterns. If a voter believes the president is doing well, he or she is more likely to support the president’s party in future elections. In particular, Sides looked at results for voters who turned 18 during Bill Clinton’s second term, either of George W. Bush’s terms, or Obama’s first term, and found results largely consistent with his hypothesis: millennial voters who turned 18 during Bush’s first term (when he had broad support following 9/11) or during Obama’s first term (when his approval ratings were negatively affected by a poor economy) are more likely to be conservative than voters who came of age during Clinton or Obama’s second terms, when Democrats were doing better.

The concept is intriguing, but it fails to consider millennials as a collection of diverse individuals rather than a uniform voting bloc, entirely politically dependent on circumstance.

Moreover, even considered as a voting bloc, millennials might be fundamentally different from previous generations in the way they identify with parties. Both of these concepts are key to understanding the news buzz around “how Democrats are losing millennials.”

Results from HPOP can more fully explain millennials’ declining support for Democrats. Since 1999, HPOP has conducted and analyzed polls each semester on the political views of mil-

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lennials. Its recent surveys have consistently asked respondents about their approval or disapproval of Obama, Democrats, and Republicans, providing a useful guide to yearly changes.

Last fall, HPOP’s press release echoed the forecasts found elsewhere in the media and noted that support for Obama fell among many groups that have historically been strong supporters of him, and of Democrats more generally. From the Spring 2013 HPOP survey to the Fall 2013 survey, Obama’s approval rating fell by 15 points among women, 18 points among Hispanics, and 9 points among African Americans.

However, such dramatic changes are far from unprecedented.

A quick analysis reveals that Obama’s level of support has oscillated wildly over the course of his administration. The recent drop may be primarily a short-term phenomenon, dovetailing closely with attitude shifts among the U.S. electorate as a whole.

These numbers may pose temporary problems for Democrats, but given how quickly Obama’s poll numbers have recovered on other occasions, they alone are unlikely to derail the party’s midterm prospects. More interesting, and potentially more worrisome, for Democrats is the long-term difference in how millennials identify with parties.

THE OBAMA EFFECT ON A DIVERSE ELECTORATE The Spring 2012 HPOP report divided the millennial electorate into four camps: “New Progressives,” “New Conservatives,” “New Religious,” and “New Passives.” The first two groups are

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self-explanatory: they represent the core Democratic and Republican supporters, respectively, and in any election cycle they are highly unlikely to vote for the opposite party. The New Religious group, on the other hand, is composed mainly of minorities who support a larger federal government but are more socially conservative than many Democrats. Their key distinguishing feature is the important role religion plays in their lives. Finally, the New Passives are less religiously and politically active but lean libertarian.

This theory of division into four ideological camps helps to explain the recent drop in millennial support for Obama. The key factor is the resonance of each party’s policies with the four subgroups of voters. More progressive immigration policies would raise support among the New Religious, while moves to balance the budget are more likely to sway the New Conservatives. Long-term measures of engagement, such as voter turnout, support this theory. With four disparate groups of millennial constituents, it’s understandable that Obama wasn’t able to reach out to each group as effectively as he would a homogenous “bloc” of young liberals.

According to the Tufts-based CIRCLE, millennial turnout changes dramatically between midterm and presidential election years, from an average of 22.7 percent to an average of 44 percent. However, among Americans ages 30 and older, this turnout gap is smaller: from 54.9 percent in midterms to 68.2 percent in presidential elections. Felicia Sullivan, a senior researcher at CIRCLE, told the HPR that this disparity might be explained by the relative lack of excitement around issues in some midterm

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elections, the lack of a high-profile race, or simple inexperience in voting. Sullivan also noted the difficulties in reaching younger voters. Rather than social media, she suggested, “what really prompts [millennials] to vote is friends talking to them, getting them to vote … making sure they know how to get to the polls.”

This result is relevant to the question of millennials’ support for Democrats because it relates to Obama’s success at communicating with young people and Republicans’ comparative failure, even when well-funded: part of the reason for Republicans’ struggles could be that they are spending their money inefficiently. “Young Voter Mobilization Tactics,” a guide released by George Washington University and CIRCLE, estimated the “cost per additional vote” of various get-out-the-vote methods. The findings, which support the effectiveness of more personal methods of voter outreach, might explain the “Obama effect,” since his campaigns poured an enormous amount of energy into mobilizing the youth vote through direct outreach. As Della Volpe said, “Up until Obama, few people tried [to mobilize millennials]. Obama showed that, if you try, if you listen and empower them, put them in charge of a significant part of the campaign, they will turn out and make a difference.”

UNDERSTANDING DEMOGRAPHIC TRENDS However, the “Obama effect” is not the sole explanation for millennials’ relationship with Democrats. Obama may also have benefited from a previously-existing trend toward greater political engagement among millennials.

Over the past 20 years, there has been a change in how young people select their representatives. CIRCLE analyzed a poll of millennials’ congressional votes, and, starting in 2002, they found that millennials began more strongly preferring candidates of their own party. This could be read negatively as a surge in polarization, or positively as an increase in political engagement. In either case, this trend peaked around 2008. Sullivan said, “There was definitely a bump in Obama’s election, but the trend was already well underway.” What, if not Obama, could be fueling this trend?

The key, Sullivan explained, is demographics. The generational cohort commonly referred to as “the millennials” is actually “a really huge group, and … a really diverse group.” Americans ages 18 to 29 include people in college, in high school, working, and even married and starting a family. Their issues and voting styles may have unique characteristics, but they don’t fundamentally differ from the broader voting community. “Sometimes people think young people only care when marijuana is on the ballot, and that’s just not true” she said, noting that young people consistently rank jobs and the economy as their top priorities.

Sullivan sees the gap between millennial support for Democrats and Republicans as driven by the generation’s greater diversity, reflecting a more diverse electorate overall. To support this claim, she breaks down millennial support for Obama versus Romney along racial and gender lines. Not surprisingly, Obama was more popular among women than men and more popular among Hispanic and African-American voters than whites.

However, the degree of the difference is startling. Obama won an astounding 98 percent of the African-American female vote but under half (41 percent) of the white male vote—the only demographic he lost. With differences this stark, Sul-

livan argues, “You need a white male strategy and a black female strategy … [millennials aren’t] this big monolithic group, and they’re not going to vote the same way because they’re young.”

A NEW STRATEGY FOR POLITICAL CAMPAIGNS? Despite extensive research on the topic, politicians and strategists seem uncertain about how to appeal to millennials as midterm elections approach. Unquestionably, the future of campaigning will need to dramatically change to mobilize millennials on the same scale as in 2008.

Yet each theory of millennial engagement suggests a different tactic. However, these theories can be combined: a generational shift in demographics could be swelling the ranks of one of the four ideological groups identified by HPOP, thus raising or lowering support for the respective parties. On top of this, changes within the groups themselves or responses to a specific policy could swing support, even independent of demographic changes.

Understanding this complex interaction of demographic and ideological factors will be crucial for long after this year’s midterms—until someone definitively cracks the millennial code, the future of American politics is up for grabs.

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NEW FACES, OLD NAMES Why a young, seemingly liberal politician in Pakistan may be bad news for the nation’s politics Sarani Jayawardena

P

akistan has seen too many coups to applaud when a man in uniform declares one.

Yet Bilawal Bhutto Zardari’s recent video proposing a coup to the people of Pakistan was met with acclaim. Unlike previous army takeovers, this one would involve no guns, uniforms, or military microfactions; rather, it would be purely cultural. Having launched his political career on a stance of cultural revival and opposition to the Taliban, Bhutto Zardari is branding himself as a voice of hope for Pakistan’s future. It remains to be seen, however, whether he can represent change while inheriting the mantle of a 60 year-old political dynasty.

Bhutto Zardari is the son of the late prime minister of Pakistan, Bilawal Bhutto Zardari raises fears of dynastic politics.

Benazir Bhutto, and former President Asif Ali Zardari, as well as the his political rivals for this docility and supports using unforgivgrandson of late Prime Minister Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto. He was ing military force against the Taliban. This approach would named chairman of the Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) after his fundamentally alter the state of Pakistan’s domestic politics and mother’s assassination by the Taliban in 2007, while he was still foreign relations. studying at Oxford University. Having recently turned 25, Bhutto Bhutto Zardari has uniquely defined his opposition to the Zardari is now old enough to run for office in Pakistan. This Taliban not only in territorial terms, but also in the battlefield of February he organized a cultural extravaganza by the ruins of culture. While the Taliban propagate a culture in which Islam Mohenjo Daro in the PPP’s home province of Sindh, and he has is pitted against the West, Bhutto Zardari favors one that mixes used the resulting media attention to increase his political presIslamic and Western values. Dr. Ahmad Balal, former consul for ence. Despite asserting that he does not want to run for prime Pakistan and current fellow at Harvard’s Weatherhead Center, minister in the 2018 election, he is certainly laying the groundsuggests that the key to this approach lies in the Sufi-influenced, work up for a long-term political career. mystic Barelvi tradition that most Pakistani Muslims follow but that the fundamentalist Taliban do not. He explains, “One vision A HOPE FOR CHANGE, OR A LASTING GRIP? of the anti-extremist forces is to go back to the Sufi tradition, and Bilawal has expressed very radical thoughts against the Bhutto Zardari has set himself apart from his political rivals Taliban in favor of this.” The recent festival Bhutto Zardari held by taking an open and unequivocal stance against the Taliban. highlighted this cultural shift by emphasizing traditional PakiHe has condemned the group for taking the country backwards stani culture within a modern celebration. and flatly rejected the terrorist organization’s fundamentalist Yet all the talk of change cannot hide the reality that the sole interpretation of Islam. Meanwhile, other politicians’ meekness enabling factor for Bhutto Zardari’s political career is his famout of fear of Taliban reprisal has allowed the organization to ily. His grandfather, mother, and father all led Pakistan, and he grow in power and influence. Bhutto Zardari has reproached appears to be following in their footsteps. The PPP is centered

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on the Bhutto family, and Bilawal’s ascension to power could be interpreted as merely an inheritance of a political crown, not an indication of merit. With little display of administrative ability to support his political pedigree, there are serious concerns about Bhutto Zardari’s ability to lead a large political party, let alone a country in crisis.

Bhutto Zardari will face an uphill battle to win elections.

His years studying abroad in Dubai and Oxford and his heavy security detail alienate him from the average Pakistani citizen.

He is even attacked by his rivals and some in the media as a poor Urdu speaker. With Pakistani youth reportedly growing more conservative, claimed Dr. Dan Markey of the Council on Foreign Relations in an interview with the HPR, “the overall electorate is shifting rightwards, not leftwards,” and Bhutto Zardari’s liberal values may not strike a chord with citizens. The rising popularity of cricketing hero-turned-politician Imran Khan and his Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf party could also split the voter base Bhutto Zardari aims to win. Balal adds that “there is an enlightened liberal progressive elite of Pakistan which Imran Khan has managed to attract. Bilawal, for the time being, cannot compete in charm and charisma.”

KEEPING IT IN THE FAMILY There is, however, a larger, underlying issue revealed by Bhutto Zardari’s political ascension: the tendency of Pakistani democracy to allow and reward dynastic politics. The continued preeminence of a few political families is conducive to high levels of corruption and bribery within an administration, which has wreaked havoc on Pakistani development. These were the very issues that haunted Bhutto Zardari’s parents throughout their political careers.

The culture of political dynasties also discourages reform and the rise of other potential candidates, particularly within the PPP. The party’s five years in government under Asif Ali Zardari were marked by corruption and ineffectiveness, and it was decisively defeated in the 2013 election that brought Nawas Sharif of the Pakistan Muslim League into power. The PPP remains relatively weak outside Sindh province, and while Bhutto Zardari may be able to rejuvenate the party temporarily, in the long run, it may never become more than the ‘Bhutto Party’ if its leadership continues to be dictated by genes rather than ability.

Sharif himself is grooming his Cambridge-educated daughter Maryam to be his successor, while his nephew Hamza Shahbaz Sharif is already the deputy chief minister of Punjab province. As Harvard Business School professor and the director of the South Asia Institute Tarun Khanna notes, “The good news here is that this generation tends to be quite exposed to the wider world, but we can’t assume they have the monopoly on wisdom.”

A WIDESPREAD PHENOMENON This problem is not, however, simply restricted to Pakistan.

The scions of political dynasties have traditionally dominated politics across South Asia. India’s Nehru-Gandhi family, the Maldive’s Gayoom family, Sri Lanka’s Bandaranaike and Ra-

japaksa families, and Bangladesh’s Sheikh Mujib family have all monopolized their respective political arenas for decades.

This has instilled a sense of entitlement and lack of accountability within many polities, leading in some cases to widespread infringements on civil rights. These leaders weave a tangled web of nepotism, corruption, and bribery, handing out political positions and business favors and undermining economic growth and development. This environment also prevents unconnected but potentially visionary leaders from achieving recognition in the public arena. Visible nepotism disheartens voters and makes them distrust the democratic process, which destabilizes democracy throughout the region.

Understanding why South Asia is so susceptible to lingering political dynasties is important. Markey considers it “a problem of non-ideological political competition.” He argues that since patronage politics supersede policy positions as a rallying strategy, “a powerful family offers tools to keep a political party together in the absence of ideals.” With the unnerving presence of an authoritative military, in some cases, the party resorts to using family to prevent internal divisions, which “would [otherwise] allow it to be eaten alive.” Balal, on the other hand, considers it a social phenomenon. He attributes the family-centric tendency of South Asian politics to the family-oriented culture of these societies. Since the family is often more central to social and civic life than in the west, leaders in power have a huge network of obligations to fulfill. They therefore expend their political capital helping those with connections to them, through what he calls a “chain of political blessings which runs from the top of society to the very end” and creates the “greatest chain of corruption on earth.”

Khanna notes that political dynasties existed even in developed countries such as the United States. Still, he explains that, compared to market-based systems in Western democracies, it is harder to climb the economic and political ladder of success on one’s own in South Asia, since “the propensity to pull upwards is difficult in developing countries” because the institutional support systems needed for an average person to propel themselves forward are still nascent.

FOR THE CITIZEN Yet for the Pakistani people, it is not the causes of South Asian political trends that matter; it is which leaders and parties can deliver the best governance and development. Bilawal Bhutto Zardari portrays himself as representing the future, and if he does eventually rise to power, he may live up to his promises of political and cultural change. Still, many question whether he can credibly hold the country’s hopes for true progress if his very name is a symbol of the past.

A famous PPP slogan reads: “Tum Kitnay Bhutto maro gay?

Har ghar say Bhutto niklay ga.” (“How many Bhuttos will you kill? A Bhutto will come out of the house every day.”) However passionate that battle cry may be, the idea of a perpetual stream of Bhuttos dominating Pakistani politics cannot be a positive force for Pakistani democracy or for the Pakistani people.

SUMMER 2014 HARVARD POLITICAL REVIEW 27

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SLEEPING GIANTS AND SUBMERGED ROCKS

THE GEOPOLITICAL TINDERBOX OF EAST ASIAN AIR DEFENSE ZONES

Neil McCullough Purdy

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hen Japanese Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto proclaimed, “I fear all we have done is to awaken a sleeping giant,” he was referring to the United States after the attack on Pearl Harbor. Today, Japan’s sleeping giant is China, but the nation’s recent aggressive actions suggest China, too, has woken up. This past November, China created an “air defense identification zone” (ADIZ) covering a vast portion of the South China Sea. The purpose of this zone, China declared, was to monitor aircraft passing through the proclaimed airspace and to have the ability to take military action if the aircraft were deemed a threat to Chinese national security. The declaration by Ministry of National Defense spokesperson Colonel Yang Yujun calling for national sovereignty and territorial security came as tensions were rising between China and Japan over territorially disputed islands in the East China Sea. Weeks after China created the ADIZ, South Korea responded by expanding its own ADIZ, a zone that had not changed since its creation in 1951.

Why would China attempt such a bold move, when it appeared relations with other regional powers were improving?

After all, Sino-Korean cooperation had been contributing to economic growth for both countries. Japan and China, despite historical animosity and the recent South China Sea spats, were maintaining normal diplomatic relations. China’s declaration of the new ADIZ was not only a provocative attempt to assert the rising nation’s regional power but also a signal to the international community of decreasing East Asian stability.

WOUNDED TIGERS After China proclaimed an ADIZ, Chinese fighter jets were dispatched to patrol the skies. The move may have been meant to send a domestic message, but it ended up shrouded in international controversy. There is no doubt Beijing was attempting to assert its power and desire for more influence in geopolitical affairs, but the ADIZ may also be a domestic message that the country is continuing to strengthen. The economic bubble China has enjoyed may be on the verge of popping: economic indicators have been predicting a decrease in growth. President Xi Jinping

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could be using the ADIZ to reinvigorate the Chinese spirit.

As a relatively new leader, Xi has been confronted with many concerning issues, from slowed economic growth to demands for more government transparency to an unpredictable North Korea. After expanding China’s proclaimed territory, Xi must back up his words or else appear weak. If he succeeds in the former, the Chinese Communist Party may gain more legitimacy with the Chinese people and stimulate nationalist fervor. If he fails, the CCP may lose much of the legitimacy it has historically enjoyed.

In recent years, tensions between China and Japan over a group of islands in the South China Sea have escalated. Known as Senkaku in Japanese and Diaoyu in Chinese, the islands are formally owned by the Japanese government after being purchased from a Japanese citizen in 2012. Japan saw the introduction of a Chinese ADIZ covering the disputed islands as an attempt by China to claim territory that has never fallen under Chinese control. The Chinese argue the islands were under Chinese jurisdiction prior to the first Sino-Japanese War, but there is no concrete evidence to support that claim. Japan responded to the zone expansion by mobilizing fighter jets shortly after the announcement. Michael Green, senior vice president for Asia and Japan chair at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, indicated in an interview with the HPR that the security of the Senkaku Islands is of great concern to the Japanese as

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a result of China’s new ADIZ. Throughout the ordeal, Japan has remained steadfast in refusing to recognize China’s proclaimed zone and has since sent multiple military aircraft through the Chinese ADIZ in defiance of it. Additionally, Japan has repeatedly denounced the ADIZ and asked the international community to condemn China’s aggressive actions. If the zone serves to signal China’s rising military power, Japan is standing its ground to defend itself from its neighbor across the sea.

AN ASSERTIVE SOUTH KOREA Not only did China’s move affect disputed Japanese islands, but the Chinese ADIZ also extends far enough into South Korean waters to cover a submerged rock that is important to both countries. Rich in natural gas and mineral deposits, this rock— known as Ieodo in Korean and Suyan in Chinese—is a valuable resource for whomever controls it. Located off the southern coast of the Korean peninsula, the rock has been under South Korea’s ADIZ since 1951.

In response to China’s ADIZ expansion, South Korea has enlarged its own zone, in addition to advancing plans to build a naval base in Jeju, near Ieodo. Professor Terence Roehrig of the United States Naval War College told the HPR that South Korea’s expansion of its own ADIZ was “a point of emphasis that this is not a Chinese zone to administer.” Seoul has said this is to protect its trade interests throughout the East China Sea, but if the dispute escalates into a military conflict, the base would also serve as a platform for South Korea to launch operations. Roehrig asserted that South Korea’s construction of a naval base in Jeju “is not surprising, as it is part of their outward look towards being involved in regional security issues.”

Both China and Japan were frustrated by South Korea’s expansion of its ADIZ, since all three ADIZs now overlap. The Japanese and South Korean zones overlap on another group of contested islands. Tensions between the governments regarding these islands—known as Dokdo in South Korean and Takeshima in Japanese—were only heightened by the conflicting zones.

The Dokdo-Takeshima Islands have been a “source of irritation between the Japanese and South Koreans for many years,” said Roehrig.

DANGER FOR THE UNITED STATES Rising regional tension has put the United States in a difficult position diplomatically. On one hand, the U.S. is an ally of both South Korea and Japan. On the other hand, Washington has no

desire to aggravate the Chinese. However, the U.S. government has made it clear that, should China use military action to obtain the Senkaku islands, the American military is bound by Article V of its Treaty of Mutual Cooperation and Security with Japan to aid in the defense of all Japanese territory. That being said, Green states, “no U.S. government is going to be eager to get into a shooting match with China. We need to deter China with our close ties to Japan.” As a means of discouraging such aggression, the United States, like Japan and South Korea, has continued to fly military aircraft through China’s ADIZ in the hopes of persuading the rising power to withdraw its claims.

Perhaps the even more complicated predicament for Washington is the dispute between South Korea and Japan over the Dokdo-Takeshima islands. There is hope that conflict can be avoided because, as Green stated, any conflict between Japan and South Korea would be “100 percent diplomatic” rather than military, as it would be “hard to mobilize forces [of U.S. allies] against each other.” Still, if the small territorial disputes escalated by East Asian air defense identification zones become more hostile, the United States may be dragged into yet another war.

The United States is also currently in the transitional period of its “Pivot to Asia.” As the U.S. Navy maneuvers a small majority of its fleet farther east, China has in some respects viewed the pivot as a military play. The United States maintains, however, that the pivot is purely diplomatic and should not be seen by the Chinese as a threat of containment or military action.

TINDER FOR THE FIRE? In a region rife with territorial dispute, the possibility of military clashes threatens stability in an already uneasy area. While “in many respects the region is largely stable,” Roehrig cautioned, “the real danger is that something inadvertent happens while the powers are asserting sovereignty.” On one level, there is “tremendous economic cooperation, and yet at another level there are these geopolitical points that could blow up.”

The question then becomes whether or not economic cooperation is powerful enough to tamp down the potential for geopolitical clashing. If the Chinese economic bubble holds and economic ties with Japan and South Korea remain solid, the ADIZ could become a moot point. On the other hand, should the bubble collapse, China may resort to more aggressive actions that provoke a military response from its neighbors. Aside from the rising tensions between China, Japan, and South Korea, competing territorial claims have been made by the Philippines, Brunei, Vietnam, and Taiwan, among others. One military or diplomatic miscalculation could lead to a conflict of massive scope.

SUMMER 2014 HARVARD POLITICAL REVIEW 29

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“HIT BY 700,000 BULLETS” ESCAPING THE ARGENTINE ECONOMIC DILEMMA Nicolas Rossenblum

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n the early 1990s, Argentina began a strong push toward neoliberal reform, drawing praise from the economic ideology’s proponents worldwide. This move precipitated the depreciation of the peso against the U.S. dollar, as well as defaults on massive debts to the International Monetary Fund, all culminating in an economic crisis in 2001. The crisis pushed millions of Argentines into a state of economic uncertainty: inflation rose to as much as 42 percent, and Argentina spiraled into chaos.

Thirteen years later, similar concerns are starting to mount.

Indeed, The Economist’s February 15 cover story pointed to Argentina as an example to developing countries of what not to do. The article harps on massive social spending projects, overreliance on commodities, and early protectionist policies—all valid factors in Argentina’s economic decline. Still, despite the prevalence of media attention denouncing the Argentine project, very few solutions have been offered.

Furthermore, very little attention is placed on the regional effects that a weakened Argentina would have, particularly in regard to Brazil, its largest trading partner. The implications of Argentina’s collapse are crucial on an international scale, and

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discussion of any way forward requires a more nuanced and constructive take on the issue at hand.

COSTUMBRES ARGENTINAS A new consumer price index registered inflation of 3.7 percent in January alone, the highest official rate since 2002. Argentina has not yet settled its foreign debts and has ongoing negotiations with French financiers and the Spanish oil giant Repsol.

It is unlikely that a temporary price fix would bring about economic stability, with massive inflation reflected in daily price hikes for food and other items. The value of the peso plunged 19 percent in January, while prices went up by 3.7 percent, the highest increase in 11 years.

There’s no shortage of opinions about the moment when the country’s economy started to go astray. No one theory solves the puzzle. “If a guy has been hit by 700,000 bullets, it’s hard to work out which one of them killed him,” said Rafael Di Tella, professor at the Harvard Business School. Some explanations point to a young Argentina that was nowhere as advanced as

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internationally perceived and thus was forced to play up to unrealistic expectations. Another perspective blames weak political institutions that lacked the power to generate successful economic policies. A bit of each of these explanations contributes to the current debacle affecting the administration of current President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner.

Put simply, Argentina in the 20th century seems out of sync with the global economy. It was a model for export-led growth when the open trading system collapsed. It pushed for the “right” policies at the wrong times. Argentines reach for the metaphor of the “pendulum” to describe the swings of the past three decades: from loose economic policies in the 1980s to Washington Consensus liberalization in the 1990s and back again under the presidency of Néstor Kirchner and now his widow, Cristina. Argentina is a long way from the turmoil of 2001, but today’s mix of rising prices, wage pressures, and mistrust of the peso have nasty echoes of the past.

On February 3, President Kirchner presented a plan to combat inflation, asking Argentines to watch for and purchase from a list of 140 products with fixed prices, available at participating supermarkets, appliance stores, and gas stations. Fittingly, the crisis has only served to heighten doubts about her government. Argentine consumers are increasingly taking to the streets to protest the unmitigated price hikes. Economic adaptation has become necessary for the average Argentine citizen, who frequently resorts to buying U.S. dollars as a means to counteract the peso’s devaluation.

In order to ease black-market demand for dollars, Argentina allows those with a monthly income of 7,200 pesos ($900) or more to purchase up to $2,000 per month in U.S. dollars. However, buying dollars as a saving measure each time the peso is devalued is not an option for those who live on limited income.

Poor citizens receive no reprieve from the disadvantageous economic climate.

IMPLICATIONS BEYOND THE BORDERS Internationally, Argentina has lost its way. It has shut itself out of global capital markets, although negotiations are under way to restructure its debts with the Paris Club of international creditors, an informal grouping of the world’s 19 largest economies. Brazil, hardly a free-trade paragon, is pressing Argentina to open its borders; once, it would have been the other way round.

“Only people this sophisticated could create a mess this big,” goes a Brazilian saying that jabs at Argentine exceptionalism.

The reason for Brazil’s concern is clear: Argentina is its larg-

est political partner in the region and one of the foundations of Mercosur, the Southern American free trade agreement. Argentina is also Brazil’s third-biggest trading partner, with $36.1 billion total trade between the two countries in 2013. Indeed, Brazil’s real fell to a five-month low as the devaluation of Argentina’s peso fueled aversion to emerging-market currencies.

As it prepares to present itself as an international player, Brazil cannot afford weakness from its most important regional ally. “Brazil is eager to ascend to the epicenter of the most powerful nations and gain some degree of influence upon the global system,” said Hussein Kalout, fellow at the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, “yet it must first solidify its regional infrastructure, Argentina being the priority.”

Argentina is also mired in the U.S. court system while looking for a solution for its outstanding debts. Argentina filed a longshot appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court on February 18, asking for a reversal of a lower court’s ruling that could force the country to default on billions of dollars in loans.

Making Argentina pay cash in full to investors who didn’t accept bond swaps in exchange for defaulted debt could destabilize the global economy by making other voluntary debt restructurings substantially more difficult, if not impossible. Secretary of State John Kerry has stated that the Obama administration would not file an amicus brief in support of the Argentine appeal. With little chance of the court overturning the prior decision, the international market is preparing for repercussions.

DEMOCRACY AND THE FUTURE In the face of a turbulent future, what can Argentina and the Kirchner administration do? Di Tella believes that the most urgent step is to stop printing money. Others, like Harvard government professor Steven Levitsky, believe the focus should be on optimizing the social policies in place. He argues that while effective in stemming Argentine inequality, “some policies like the widespread energy subsidies have become so inflated that they do more harm than good.”

Scholars like Di Tella and Levitsky see the Kirchner government as willing to seek economic revitalization through avenues previously discarded on ideological grounds, albeit with a focus on minimizing backlash from its core constituency. The Kirchners are known for their social programs and their belief in spreading wealth. While they do not want to alienate those who have stood behind them due to those principles, it has become evident that some beliefs will have to be sacrificed for Argentina’s future stability.

Argentina ... was the model for export-led growth when the open trading system collapsed. It pushed for the “right” policies at the wrong times.

SUMMER 2014 HARVARD POLITICAL REVIEW 31

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The Changing Face of Germany Ethnic nationalism and the debate over Turkish immigrants

Francesca Annicchiarico

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itizenship reform has been a top priority of the German legislature since it took office in September 2013. Talks among the governing coalition have been ongoing in the six months since its election, though no laws have passed yet. The outcome of the debate, which has largely focused on dual citizenship provisions, will particularly affect the legal and civic status of the over three million Turks who live in Germany. Despite a widespread ethnic conception of national identity, Germany is undergoing a deep and controversial transformation by shifting its citizenship law from ius sanguinis, under which only people of German descent could acquire German citizenship, to ius soli, in which citizenship is automatically granted to anyone born on German soil. Still, Germany seems unprepared to relinquish its old, exclusivist conception of nationhood.

CITIZENSHIP AND ITS CHALLENGES A citizenship reform law passed in 2000 officially marked the transition from the principle of ius sanguinis to that of ius soli. This new law allowed children born to Turkish parents who settled in the country decades ago to finally be recognized as German citizens. The reform also set the criteria for naturalization, granting immigrants who fulfill the requirements the right to become citizens. The new citizenship law came as a recogni-

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tion of Germany’s status as an immigrant country. It represented the first legal effort to abandon an outdated ethnic conception of national identity for a more inclusive one. Fourteen years after the reform, however, citizenship and naturalization remain controversial issues in Germany, especially in light of the country’s strong stance against dual citizenship.

Germany requires both naturalized citizens and those who acquired citizenship at birth by virtue of ius soli to abandon their former nationality. While immigrants need to make this decision upon naturalization, children born in Germany to foreign parents can keep their dual citizenship until they are twenty-three years old. In an interview with the HPR, Yasemin Karakasoglu, a professor at the University of Bremen, explained that most children born to Turkish parents decide to keep their German nationality and forfeit their Turkish one. Karakasoglu added, however, that adult Turks who have the right to naturalize are often hesitant to relinquish their Turkish citizenship, believing that “if they give up their Turkish citizenship they will lose their cultural and emotional roots to Turkey.”

According to Ruud Koopmans, research director at the Berlin Social Science Center, Turks who decide not to naturalize engage in self-exclusion. “The barrier is in their own heads,” he said in an interview with the HPR. Koopmans pointed to the “underutilized potential of voters” that the Turkish minority represents: “Millions of people who have lived here for decades

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and who were born here and fulfill all the criteria to obtain German citizenship could be voters in the next elections. They could have much more influence than they currently have.”

On the other hand, Karakasoglu told the HPR that since 2007, Germany has allowed European Union citizens to keep their former citizenship in addition to their German one. Considering Turkey’s efforts to become a member of the European Union, this measure can be seen as discriminating specifically against the Turkish minority. Moreover, Ulrich Kober, director of the Center of Excellence for Democracy and Integration at the Bertelsmann Foundation, highlighted to the HPR that while Germany does consider dual citizenship requests on a case-bycase basis, American citizens obtain this privilege much more often than Turkish citizens do. Because the decision to grant dual citizenship to non-EU nationals is a legal exception, it lends itself to arbitrariness. In this sense, then, the current citizenship law is indeed discriminatory.

GERMANNESS AND SOCIAL INCLUSION The legal transition in the requirements for German nationality has not always mirrored changes in the mindset of the German people. As Koopmans noted, “In the hearts and minds of the people, the heritage of an ethnic conception of national identity has not completely disappeared.” Baha Gungor, a Turkish-born German journalist, said that despite his citizenship status he is still socially perceived as a Turk. Gungor told the HPR that to be considered German he would have to change his religion and his family name. “I will never be a real German,” he concluded.

According to Kober, it will take time for “the mental patterns” of the German people to adapt to a more inclusive idea of nationality.

Karakasoglu said that the old ethnic conception of national identity is inconceivable for younger generations, who have grown up in a multicultural and multilingual environment. The older generations, however, still often associate “Germanness” with a shared ancestry and even a specific phenotype, or physical appearance. Karakasoglu added that people from western Germany are more likely than people from eastern Germany to share a vision of an inclusive nation, with this differentiation resulting from the ethnic composition of the two regions. The east has historically been much more homogeneous than the west, making it harder for eastern Germans to accept a multicultural Germany.

Full inclusion of the Turkish community is further complicated by Germany’s strong identification with its past. Werner Schiffauer, a professor at Europa Universitat Viadrina, explained to the HPR that Germanness is largely founded upon a shared sense of collective responsibility that emerged in the aftermath of the Second World War. Because Turks only began immigrating to Germany in the 1960s, they have been excluded from the collective memory that has defined Germans’ self-perception. As a result, Schiffauer argues, the Turkish minority is often not seen as fully belonging to the national community. It is likely, however, that this shared feeling of collective responsibility characterizes the older generations to a much greater extent than the younger generations. Therefore, the perception of the Turkish

community as alien may be a generational phenomenon destined to wane.

Obstacles to inclusiveness, however, may not come exclusively from ethnic Germans. As Koopmans stated, “Turks have an extremely strong sense of national identity.” A large proportion of Turks who currently reside in Germany came to the country during the regime of Ataturk, one of the most prominent nationalistic figures of the 20th century. Koopmans added that the Turkish community is often “inwardly-oriented,” referring to its intra-marital tendencies and ethnically defined social circles.

ISLAM AND STATE RECOGNITION Turkish immigrants brought not only a new culture but also a foreign religion with them to Germany. Because of its internal structure and perceived political implications, Islam complicates the integration of the Turkish community. In Germany, churches must seek state recognition in order to obtain privileges such as providing religious education in schools, organizing social services, and levying taxes on the population. Therefore, the establishment of a religious organization largely depends upon state sanction. Christianity in its various denominations has enjoyed state recognition since modern Germany’s founding. However, in the last several decades, the influx of immigrants from outside Europe has posed the challenge of incorporating new religions, particularly Islam, into the state.

Unlike Christian communities, Islamic communities are not organized in a formal, hierarchical manner. Because Islamic leadership is not as institutionalized as Christian leadership, Kober argued, it is more challenging for the state to broker a deal with this new religion. According to him, there is no Muslim organization in Germany that can claim to speak for the entire Islamic community, which undermines the possibility of being officially recognized by the state. Koopmans affirmed that the presence of multiple Muslim groups in Germany puts the state in a difficult position. Still, the establishment of the German Islam Conference in 2006 represented an important effort on the part of the state to integrate Islamic organizations into German public life. “It’s very important that Islam is no longer perceived as a foreign religion,” Kober asserted.

The effect of recognition on the social integration of the Turkish minority, however, is uncertain. Pointing to the high occupational status that Iranian Muslims in Germany enjoy, Kober argued that integration is more a matter of education and socioeconomic conditions than of religious recognition. However, it is undeniable that Christians fare socioeconomically and educationally better than Muslims in many respects, and that the majority of ethnic Germans have negative feelings towards Islam.

According to Karakasoglu, as policymakers discuss the next steps Germany needs to take in the direction of a more inclusive citizenship law, there needs to be a shift from minority politics to a politics that targets ethnic Germans and non-Germans alike.

Only by reassessing what it means to be German can the nation incorporate, both legally and socially, its diverse group of new immigrants.

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BOOKS & ARTS

ADVERTISING 2.0 Kaitlyn Jeong

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n an increasingly digitized world, technology has made it easier than ever to connect with likeminded individuals and tailor online experiences to personal preferences. From Hulu’s persistent quest to learn “which ad experience would you prefer?” to Facebook’s relentless attempts to promote textbook rentals on students’ news feeds, it’s clear that advertisements are now, more than ever, focused on the consumer. While the ever-familiar instruction to “sell, sell, sell” has remained constant since the publication of the first newspaper advertisement in 1704, technology has made it possible to target individual groups of people with specific interests—a vast departure from the marketing appeals to the masses that were employed before the 1970s. More than just a means of shaping society, the advertisements of today are now better equipped to reflect the interests and values of individual consumers.

A SHIFTING FOCUS The historical shift from the more product-centered advertisements of the early 1900s to the strategically consumer-specific commercials of the present day was partially driven by changes in technology. In an interview with the HPR, Daniel Pope, a professor of history at the University of Oregon, explained that companies today use a “market segmentation strategy, rather than try[ing] to sell to a mass market,” a drastic break from advertising techniques used in the late 19th and 20th centuries. Instead of advertising their product for the general public, companies are now homing in on key demographic groups that make up only a segment of the entire market. During the 1950s, for example, automobile manufacturers encouraged individuals to buy their cars simply by promoting the idea that the majority of people in America were car owners. Today, car commercials tout special features for families with children, individuals who enjoy road trips, and even those who want a hands-free way to control their music. These types of technological breakthroughs have made it such that products become popular by meeting each consumer’s specific needs, rather than by appealing to the

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BOOKS & ARTS

“WHICH AD EXPERIENCE WOULD YOU PREFER?”

masses. In looking at the way advertisements are designed to sell products like these, it’s clear that technology has enabled commercials to fully address the interests of the consumers.

More than just establishing how the purchase of any given product will match a specific individual’s lifestyle, commercials today are expected to also make a statement about how a product may affect how people interact with the world around them.

For example, the popular Dos Equis beer commercials featuring the “Most Interesting Man in the World” and the Internet meme-inducing quote, “I don’t always drink beer, but when I do, I prefer Dos Equis,” both focus on the consumer, rather than the taste or ingredients of the product itself. In ads like these, Pope explained, “there’s always a wink and a nod. Businesses know that their product isn’t really going to change your life, but they try anyway.” Even though viewers don’t expect to become the “Most Interesting People in the World” upon drinking Dos Equis, the possibility of social elevation helps bring the consumer’s potential for a new lifestyle to the forefront. In this instance, the redirection of attention toward the consumer demonstrates the level of awareness that companies have developed with regards to new trends in consumer expectations.

This change toward a specifically consumer-focused culture has also spurred a shift in the way companies develop and gather information for their advertisements. While commercials from decades ago were dedicated to showcasing what might appeal to consumers, companies are now able to pinpoint what people are most interested in. Using information gathered from web-searches and social media activity, companies can now zero in on exactly what to highlight in their ads. As the debate over user privacy and external organizations’ access to personal data rages on, this laser-focus on marketing to populations with specific needs exemplifies Pope’s observation that “advertising is self-conscious,” for its main goal lies in bringing the product in line with the consumer’s values and ideals. To keep up with the changing ideals and values within society, advertisements are forced to remain sensitive to prominent issues and current trends that might influence a customer’s perspective on a certain product.

MAKING THE CONNECTION

a more deeply-embedded goal within the advertising industry: finding ways to remain relevant to the consumer. Former marketing adviser Jimmy Alyea told the HPR in an interview that “commercials are always changing, but the secret to ads now is connecting with the consumer.” According to Alyea, one of the main mistakes that advertisers make is “going off of the 1960s mentality by only trying to appeal to the emotions of Americans.”

This year’s display of Super Bowl commercials is a prime example: critics lamented that companies chose to “play it safe” by tugging on viewer’s heartstrings, rather than push the boundaries with more sensational and consumer-centric advertisements.

Still, some of the more emotional ads, including Budweiser’s classic Clydesdale commercial, were able to gain popularity, thanks to the active horse and puppy lovers on social media who helped circulate the advertisement weeks before it aired on television. “That’s why social media is so good,” Alyea explained, “it can really target people and is all about trying to connect.

Regular advertisements just don’t know how to do that.”

The trend toward social media usage has not gone unnoticed by marketing firms and researchers. According to a study by Nielsen, an organization that conducts and publishes market research globally, Internet advertising grew by more than 32 percent in the first three quarters of 2013. While advertising on television still remains the most popular medium for sending a message out to consumers, it is clear that the trend toward online marketing is not slowing down anytime soon. Sean Casey, public affairs director at the marketing firm Eric Mower, explained to the HPR that “firms are reevaluating what is going on in the marketing world because of technology and social media.”

Casey stated that social media has enabled advertisers to immediately adapt to changes in consumers’ needs and allowed people to play a more active role in selecting what types of products they want to see, something that has set the precedent for even more consumer-based advertisements in the future. His predictions for what is to come next in the advertising world include the idea that “we are going to see commercials that are even more personalized to consumers. Companies need to be able to stay current with the trends that are coming up, and social media plays a big role in identifying that.” In other words, those advertisers successful in making this transition stand to benefit enormously from social media’s ubiquitous use.

The emphasis on consumer-focused commercials indicates

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BOOKS & ARTS

TO FERMENT AND FOMENT THE CURIOUS LINKS BETWEEN NATIONALISM AND BEER Olivia Zhu

“Y

ou can’t be a real country unless you have a beer and an airline. It helps if you have some kind of a football team, or some nuclear weapons, but at the very least you need

a beer.”

This is nation-state building according to Frank Zappa. It could well be that he was right: what is Ireland without Guinness, Mexico without Corona? The beverage has proved to be a surprisingly powerful emblem of nationalism and cultural identity. With such a long history and such enduring popularity, its narrative cannot be separated from the course of human development: beer helps define where we come from and who we are.

BEER BEFORE BREAD Even in antiquity, beer built nations and cultures. In an interview with the HPR, Patrick McGovern, scientific director of the Biomolecular Archaeology Project for Cuisine, Fermented Beverages, and Health at the University of Pennsylvania Museum, told the HPR that beer “encouraged people to settle down, build temples and places, and then take care of grains to have enough beer to keep this going.”

In other words, civilization owes a great debt to the human thirst for booze. McGovern’s thesis is not an outlandish one: the notion of “beer before bread”—that brewing, not baking, determined where ancient communities settled—is one advocated by master brewers and professors of psychiatry alike.

Why is beer so important? Contrary to common sense, the beverage appears to suit our diet well. As McGovern noted, “Fermented foods keep better and attract humans,” and our enzymes are capable of transforming that beer into energy. According to the archaeologist,

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BOOKS & ARTS

“we are primed biologically to consume alcoholic beverages.”

This may be why beer’s invention could even have preceded that of bread, sustaining humans as they settled in Mesopotamia and beyond. Yet another argument for the early adoption of beer is that fermentation occurs naturally, while the rise of bread requires quite a bit of human intervention.

That beer is so easy to make likely led to its prevalence in ancient communities, and its evolution correlates with the growth of society itself. UCSB professor of geography Daniel Montello argues that, despite organic fermentation processes, one could think of “the origins of beer as cultural innovation.” Not only has “beer [been] invented multiple times in multiple parts of the world,” ales and lagers might have led to the development of political systems as we know them. That is, the development of brewing is as innate as the formation of government and society, and fundamentally linked to it.

Alcohol’s contribution to human societies began with its prominence in religious ceremonies, which heavily influenced ancient rulers. The role of beer and wine in the religions of old cannot be underestimated, and, according to McGovern, the beverages helped people understand their role in the universe— if only after inebriated introspection. More importantly, the archaeologist makes the link that “the tie between religion and rulers was very close … and it is often [left to] the rulers who had the expendable income and control to set up the production of the [alcoholic] beverages to build monumental structures.” His assertion seems plausible, especially given evidence that the great pyramids of Egypt were built on the backs of beer-fueled laborers. There, each worker “had a 5-liter allotment daily of beer,” and whether in Egypt or Peru or elsewhere, “rulers were taking key fermented beverages like beer or wine, and they were using it to bring the community together and do lots of extra work.” McGovern’s assertion that beer “is what encouraged to some extent, maybe to major extent, the rise of cities” is reasonable.

Yet alcohol did more than build cities—it also filled them and civilized them. McGovern likes to say that “beer is what makes us human.” He explains, “We can make a strong case that … humans use these beverages to encourage social interaction, to celebrate special ceremonies in the political realm, [and] that treaties or agreements are being discussed and signed off on and celebrated with alcoholic beverages.” Even our contemporary White House used its own honey ale to broker peace at the “Beer Summit” that addressed the controversy surrounding Henry Louis Gates’ 2009 arrest.

Perhaps that debt is why modern beers tip their hats to history and faith: Sam Adams is an American patriot and a lovely lager while Stella is both the Christmas star and a pilsner. There are beers named “Plead the Fifth,” “Commodore Perry,” “Lincoln’s Logger,” and “Roosevelt,” among many other patriotic and historical names. It’s difficult to determine how a government would exist sans alcohol, but far less a stretch to imagine the taste of beer before the invention of politics.

A LOCAL BREW Beer, out of all other alcoholic substances, has the unique ability to engender regional pride and cohesion. In part, beer is a result of geography. As Wesleyan government professor Peter Rutland told the HPR, until railcars and better technol-

ogy became more prevalent, “beer was a very local product, and it could not be transported very far.” Since regional flavor was highly dependent upon local grains and flavorings, cultural identities were inextricably linked to specific brews. Moreover, grains and other beer components are staples that are often hardier and cheaper than wine grapes and other fruits. Montello points out that due to its combination of relatively low alcohol content and a flavor profile that matches far more food than wine does, “beer is the most popular alcoholic beverage in the world.”

That being said, certain areas prefer wines and liquors: those are their regional beverages. Rutland notes, for example, “In southern Europe, wine is connected with nationalism (e.g. Bull’s Blood in Hungary). And, of course, vodka is connected to Russian and Polish identity, and whisky to Scottish identity. So beer is not so different from other forms of alcohol.” Nevertheless, the professor also notes there are economic advantages to beer, as it is “more associated with workers, and football, while wine is more associated with the middle class,” suggesting that beer is truly the drink of the everyman despite any regional anomalies.

In fact, choosing beer over wine is a deterministic stance for Catalonian revolutionaries. Craft brewers, in an effort to push back against the dominance of Spanish beer in the region, have chosen to expand beyond the region’s traditional cava to compete in the ring of lager and ale. By including uniquely Catalonian flavors in their blends these microbrewers are contributing, in their own way, to the secessionist movement in the area.

Encouraging the Catalan people to forsake cheap Spanish beer is, like reclaiming dialect and land, a fiercely nationalistic action.

Beer’s locality also imbues it with a sense of heritage and tradition. The beverage speaks to an agrarian past of honest work and recreation, and it makes sense that particular groups will prefer their particular beer. Add to that the main drinking demographic, young men aflame with fervor for their country and their sports team, and therein lies the recipe for nationalism.

Even today, the socializing aspect of consuming ales and lagers is a building block for regional movements. Although building “beeramids” in fraternity houses is a far cry from constructing the edifices at Giza, both ancient Egyptian laborers and new pledge brothers rely on beer to bring them closer to their peers and build a communal identity.

NATIONAL FERVOR BREWING So, beer is regional. But is it national? It seems difficult to tell, given that “it’s very hard to measure nationalism, to isolate behavior which is nationalist,” according to Rutland. Montello, meanwhile, asserts that beers can correlate with regional or cultural identity, but national identity might be more of a stretch.

On the other hand, in certain instances, McGovern believes that “with beer, or even with other distilled beverages, you can equate the beverage with the country.”

That certainly seems to be the case with smaller regions.

The Catalonian microbrewers are one clear example, and the Palestinian Taybeh brand is another. The proprietors of the first and only Palestinian beer rely on alcohol-drenched social ties to promote a nationalistic agenda alongside their brew: part of their mission, as stated on the company website, is to brew “an excellent Palestinian beer while creating a nationalistic feeling.”

While their efforts have been concentrated in a small, epony-

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BOOKS & ARTS

Yet alcohol did more than build cities—it also filled them and civilized them. McGovern likes to say that “beer is what makes us human.”

mous village, Taybeh seeks to expand beyond its region and increase its market share in Israel as well.

South Africa has a similarly powerful beer story. During apartheid, South African Breweries broke the law by illicitly selling its products to black Africans. According to history professor Anne Mager, “from the early 1960s, the SAB’s beer division developed an astute sense of how to harness for their own purposes the deep alienation of black people,” using nationalism as a tool to sell more bottles.

These anecdotes are not distinctive—each beer, in its own way, has a cultural origin story. So, too, does each beer feed off of regional, even national, popularity.

THE BUSINESS OF BOOZE Evidence of how beer and nationalism interlink is most clear in how breweries market their products. Leanne White, senior lecturer of marketing at Victoria University and author of Wine and Identity, told the HPR, “Beer campaigns can be particularly effective when patriotism is used. These sorts of appeals—to nation and also to a state or a region—help set one brand apart from another.” For example, Molson launched one of the most successful advertisements of all time, not just for beer, by drawing on its country of origin. Its “I am Canadian” campaign took off in 2000 and spawned innumerable parodies, but it seemed quite clear that Molson was selling Canadian beer to Canadians.

Although Molson has since merged with the American brand Coors, dropping the “I am Canadian” slogan in the process, it still leverages national pride as a clever marketing ploy. In honor of the Olympics, Molson set up a beer fridge in Sochi that only opened for Canadian passport holders, which, while not a good way to move volume, certainly drew mass media attention.

Nationalism is a lucrative strategy, and such tactics are not isolated to the west. In Asia, where German travelers introduced beer, a Laotian beer has taken on its own flavor. Beerlao dominates consumption in the country and the company reinvests in its nation, too, to the order of $32.5 million in 2005. While this may seem like a sign of true nationalism, Beerlao’s success was likely a result of a 40 percent tariff on foreign beers, and it seems that the brand relies on patriotic fervor to sell units.

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Countries also heavily promote their national flavors for economic reasons, not just nationalistic ones. This is of course true of beverages other than beer. But succeeding internationally is even more essential than succeeding domestically, hence why Taybeh is looking toward Israel. Notes Rutland, “at this stage … it is more a commercial question than a question of political nationalism.” Part of the shift from regional identity to national merchandising may be due to the fact that, “In the late 20th century beer making became increasingly concentrated in international conglomerates, but national branding continued to be used.”

As a result, certain beer brands became indelibly linked to their countries, in accordance with McGovern’s suggestion that the two can be equated at times. White somewhat agrees, as “beer is all about connecting with the brand” and “people identify strongly with place.” Consequentially, consumers react with ire when “their” brands merge with or are acquired by foreigners. Japanese Asahi’s investment in Chinese Tsingtao, the Molson-Coors merger, and the acquisition of American Anheuser-Busch by Belgian InBev all led to significant outcry. According to White, “people like ‘ownership’ of their local brand,” just as they might feel belonging to the brand’s place of origin. In the case of beer, brands may leverage nationalism, but the people will also claim their stake.

PINTS AND PATRIOTISM It is clear that beer is helpful in defining what White calls place identity and can be an integral part of it. Far murkier, however, is how much ales, lambics, and lagers actually contribute to a national identity. While the emergent multinationals may have developed patriotic slogans out of marketing necessity, that link seems artificial and tenuous compared to secessionist or independence movements propelled, in part, by beer. The recent renaissance of craft brewing, especially in the United States, might test the hold that traditional “American” beers have on our national identity, splintering fandom into more regional blocks. Those trends will certainly be interesting to observe. In the meantime, crack open a brew—and think about how it made you human.

BOOKS & ARTS

AMERICA’S SPORT AUDITED THE NFL’S TAX-EXEMPT STATUS UNDER ATTACK Anita Lo

O

n June 8, 1966, the American Football League and the National Football League announced that they intended to merge. Five months later, on November 8, 1966, an act to “suspend investment credit” on some types of real property was amended to confirm the tax-exempt status of large football leagues: “[anti-trust laws] shall not apply to a joint agreement by which the member clubs of two or more professional football leagues, which are exempt from income tax under section 501(c) (6) of the Internal Revenue Code of 1954, combine their operations in expanded single league so exempt from income tax.”

Nearly 50 years later, a Change.org petition titled “Revoke the Tax-Exempt Status of the National Football League” reached 300,000 signatures; 500,000 signatures are needed to deliver it to Senator Tom Coburn (R-Okla.), who is currently sponsoring the Properly Reducing Overexemptions for Sports (PRO Sports) Act. “It’s absolutely revolting that they receive a tax exempt status,” a comment on the petition’s page reads. “Who exactly do they benefit other then [sic] themselves. I can’t even afford to buy a ticket to a game. How many tickets do they donate to needy kids to go watch a game?”

The NFL, of course, is not tax-exempt because of any social services. “The issue is pretty easy to demagogue,” said Daniel J. Flynn, author of The War on Football: Saving America’s Game.

Flynn makes the demagoguery seem inevitable, but the reasons behind the issue’s sensitivity are not intuitive. The full story involves a brief history of tax law, shifting attitudes toward nonprofits, and feverish football fan culture.

ANATOMY OF A TAX BREAK The route taken to purge the NFL of its tax-exempt status is not a lawsuit or an investigation: the league violates no tax codes and annually publishes its IRS Form 990 for public scrutiny.

Various numbers have been thrown around, but looking at the 2011 990 reveals some interesting figures. First, the NFL’s revenue less expense in 2011 and 2010 was negative. Second, Commissioner Roger Goodell’s $30 million salary is four times larger than the NFL’s second most highly-compensated employee.

Third, nearly $700 million of the NFL’s $875 million assets are held in “notes and loans receivable.” This indicates that the NFL would not pay much in taxes even if it were a company, while highly-compensated employees do pay income taxes. It also shows that the NFL is more similar to a bank than anything else.

Given the money that flows through the organization, the $100 million in tax dollars that Coburn’s bill is supposed to save is relatively insignificant. Since the bill also affects the National Hockey League and Professional Golf Association, that $100 million doesn’t even exclusively come from taxing the NFL. In an interview with the HPR, Andrew B. Delaney of the law firm Martin Associates said, “Without a complete overhaul of the tax code, [revoking the tax-exempt status] will have little effect on the coffers” of either the government or the NFL. The public looking to make a significant monetary impact could potentially protest Boeing’s $13.2 billion taxpayer subsidies. But the NFL

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BOOKS & ARTS

remains the focus.

The real reasons for the tax-exempt status today involve the advent of microwave transmission technology for television.

In 1962, CBS was able to secure the rights to all regular-season games of the NFL for $4.65 million.

“Nobody saw the NFL network being something before cable,” Delaney explains. In decades preceding the advent of widespread cable TV, local stations were segmented, meaning that there was no prospect of a national network developing.

Soon, microwave transmission of broadcasts allowed TV stations to cover much larger regions, in turn making regional (and then national) broadcast rights much more valuable. Part of the trouble, then, stems from technology outpacing the law—legislators seemed not to anticipate needing to regulate broadcast rights that spanned the entire West or East coast.

The desire to revoke the tax-exempt status isn’t the result of any legal wrongdoing. In fact, from 2007 to 2009, the IRS conducted an audit of the NFL and “concluded that it was fully in compliance with the laws,” writes Jeremy Spector, an outside tax consultant for the NFL at Covington LLP. Goodell pays income tax on his salary; the teams pay sales and income tax on concessions and ticket sales. They even established a separate for-profit arm, NFL Ventures, to handle the controversial stadium loan program.

THE NOBLE NONPROFIT EXPECTATION The real cause of outcry over the NFL’s status is tied to the role that the public expects nonprofits to play in alleviating wealth disparities in society. The NFL is clearly not a nonprofit in the popular sense of the word. Harvard University, for instance, is an organization that exists to mainly serve educational purposes, and therefore qualifies as a 501(c)(3) organization, along with Christ Church Cambridge and the Phillips Brooks House Association. In contrast, the NFL has been a 501(c)(6) “business league” since its application was accepted by the IRS in the 1940s; the public law 89-900 merely confirmed its status.

Other 501(c)(6) groups include the Massachusetts Bar Association and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, both trade associations that exist to help their members. Thus, it’s unsurprising that 69 percent of respondents in a Farleigh Dickinson University Public Mind survey answered that the NFL was not a nonprofit, while only 13 percent knew that it was.

When public money is involved, the public expects something to show for it. “We just don’t think it’s right that the NFL … takes further advantage of our tax system,” said Ryan Rudominer, cofounder of Sack NFL Tax Breaks. “One would think at a time when we have a $640 billion deficit, it would be a no-brainer for members of Congress in Washington to back the PRO-Sports Act.” It is an additional frustration that tickets are prohibitively expensive for some fans—a frustration only exacerbated by the recent media coverage surrounding the wealth gap in America.

“The economic landscape was very different [in the mid-20th century],” writes Gregg Easterbrook in The King of Sports: Football’s Impact on America. “Football stadiums might be viewed as you would view a public library today; you could see a game

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there for $10 in today’s dollars.”

Imagine the discomfort of taxpayers who feel that their “forced donations” to the American government fund an organization that does not provide any conventional “public goods” and furthermore compensates its employees far beyond football fans’ salaries. Donors are uncomfortable with 501(c)(3) charities spending more than 15 percent on “non-charitable” activities such as fundraising, whereas nonprofit watchdogs suggest 35 percent as a reasonable proportion. The outrage following revelations that the American Red Cross set aside nearly half of the $564 million raised in the wake of 9/11 for “other operations and future reserves” is another instance of the public’s reluctance to give money to causes that don’t directly help someone ‘in need.’

CULTURE OF OWNERSHIP The consensus that fans should not be asked to finance their teams’ activities might be less bizarre had it not been reached in a country where many people “speak” with donations to causes they find worthy, or if the consensus was also that football was an unworthy cause. Granted, the latter claim is becoming easier to make. “Football has suffered such terrible publicity,” sportswriter Frank Deford told NPR. The football news that has reached non-sports fans includes the Miami Dolphins’ locker room harassment, a 4,100-plaintiff concussion lawsuit, and rampant sexual assault. Football is, at times, the media’s whipping boy; and yet, football fandom grows: just as constituents detest Congress yet believe their congressperson worthy of reelection, many football fans combine passionate support of their team with suspicion and mistrust of the NFL an organization. “Even as a defender of football, I don’t think [the NFL] should be taxexempt,” said Flynn.

Rudominer said that his organization “[doesn’t] think loving the game of football and the NFL needing to pay its fair share in taxes are mutually exclusive.” The organization instead aims to “pressure the league to end its anti-fan behavior, pay its fair share, and play by the same rules as everyone else.”

EXPLAINING THE CLASH Woolard’s Change.org petition reads, “The NFL has methodically worked to shift all the power to their side, leaving players, employees and PARTICULARLY THE FANS little say in what goes on with the league. We deserve a say, but do not wish to boycott our teams!” In other words, we, as fans, want the NFL to play by the same rules as everyone else. We love football, as long as we can maintain the belief that we own it.

Perhaps these tax breaks are particularly abhorrent because they’re a betrayal from within: the perception that our heroes are not subject to the same everyday hardships—including taxes—as we are is more alienating than anything else. Perhaps the NFL League Office has never claimed to be a charity, but it doesn’t seem as if the fans want the NFL to be a charity. They want fair play, a level playing field—various sports metaphors that belie a longing to bridge the gap between football fans and football heroes.

INTERVIEWS

INTERVIEW: THOMAS MENINO with Erin Shortell a 20 percent dropout rate; now we’re down to six percent.

We had nobody going to college. We had over-enrollment in a lot of the schools. When I first took over, we were looking for teachers, and we couldn’t get teachers to come to Boston. Now we have 3,000. We’re getting the cream of the crop in the city.

All those things are factors that make a city better.

You’ve done a lot of work to curb gun violence.

As far as gun laws go, what is your vision for Boston?

Thomas Menino served as Boston’s mayor from 1993 through January 2014. He spoke with the Harvard Political Review about the new challenges facing mayors in the 21st century.

How do you feel that the institution of the mayor has evolved in the 21st century?

Mayors for a long time depended on the federal government. Now the federal government doesn’t help cities much … and state governments cut local aid every year. So we have to manage our resources better. It’s most important that the mayor pays attention to his budget and makes sure he has a budget that works. In my years as mayor, I brought the city from a $28 million deficit to a $20 million surplus. I always say, you don’t make headlines with the budget, but it gives you headlines. If your budget works, your city works.

What was your greatest challenge as mayor, and what do you consider the major challenges for Boston in the future?

Massachusetts has by far some of the toughest gun laws.

We need a countrywide program. It’s not gun control; it’s crime control. … Massachusetts has tough laws, and we deal with [guns] well. But there’s an influx of guns coming from the South, from New Hampshire, and some other places.

That’s the problem: we all have different laws, and they’re not universal.

I think we’ve done some good things in the past. Operation Homefront is a program where probation officers and police officers visit parents of the individuals we’re looking at. But also … you give people opportunity. … If they have no opportunity, they turn to the streets. They don’t see any future for themselves. … So we have to do a better job giving people opportunity and job training.

As we saw last April, guns aren’t the only weapons that people can use to create horrible violence. Did the Boston Marathon bombing change the climate surrounding your fight to reduce gun violence in Boston?

Well, it made more people aware [of violence]. I’m cochair of Mayors Against Illegal Guns. Mayor Bloomberg and I started that nine years ago. Five hundred mayors aren’t making an impression in Washington. They’re deaf down there.

The NRA is running Washington when it comes to guns, and that’s unfortunate. These congressmen and senators have to get their heads together and make sure that we have real, strong gun legislation in this country—in every state, and not just in a few states.

This interview has been edited and condensed.

I think the greatest challenge was to move Boston Public Schools to the position it’s in today. When I took over, we had

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INTERVIEWS

INTERVIEW: MIKE MCCURRY with Arjun Kapur forget the guy who was the campaign manager—a big, cigarchomping guy—said, “Who wrote this?” I raised my hand, and he said, “Kid, you’re our press secretary now.” I had no idea what a press secretary was. It was just a natural fit with what I enjoyed doing, so off I went.

Moving to your work for the Clinton administration, can you describe the preparation process for a White House press briefing?

Mike McCurry served as the White House Press Secretary during the Clinton administration.

What led you to pursue a career in public service and communications?

Growing up in high school, I had two loves. One was journalism, and one was politics. I got to Princeton and worked my way through as a newspaper reporter on campus. This was during the Watergate years, so Woodward and Bernstein were the role models for everybody. I said, “Okay, that’s what I want to do; I want to be the next big Washington Post reporter.” I actually worked at Princeton for a paper that was owned by The Washington Post, and I thought that I had my job lined up.

During my senior spring semester, I was all set up to work for them, and then they decided to sell the newspaper. I said, “Oh shit, I’m getting screwed by The Washington Post.” I always tell that story, saying that was not the last time I got screwed by The Washington Post. I ended up without a job.

I was a senior in college, and Jerry Brown was running for president in 1976. I was from California, and I liked him. I said, “Well, I’d be interested in working for a campaign,” so I went down and volunteered.

The guy who was running it said, “Can someone write a press release, because we’re getting an endorsement from the Middlesex Democratic Party?” ... I said, “Yeah, I can write a press release.” So I wrote the press release, and I’ll never

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It’s very intensive, but for me it was mostly in my head.

I’ve always been a fairly early riser, but when I worked at the White House, I’d get up at about 4:30 in the morning because that’s when The Washington Post, New York Times, and Wall Street Journal got delivered on my front driveway. First, I’d strap on my earphones and listen to the BBC, which was on our local National Public Radio station, and I’d walk the dogs.

I’d start hearing what the news of the day looked like, then get back and go through all the newspapers and read them very thoroughly. Then I’d go take a shower. I’d say that in the shower, 80 percent of what was going to happen that day ran through my head. And I started thinking, “Here’s what the questions will be, here are the answers I can come up with, let me try that out.”

Then I would obviously drive down to the White House and be at the 7 a.m. staff meeting. But as I went through that, I’d already kind of figured out, “Here’s what I think we’re going to have to say about this issue or that issue.” So I had it in my head … but then there was an enormous amount of getting information, going around to the different agencies, going around to the colleagues at the White House and saying, “Okay, you have to help me understand this particular issue, we’re announcing this big initiative, let’s walk through that, explain that to me.” I would go down to the secure room at the Situation Room in the White House and read all the classified intelligence from around the world. The stuff that screws you up is when there’s something going on that you don’t know about, and you sort of say there’s nothing going on when something is going on. That’s the fatal mistake that press secretaries make.

I would rehearse what I thought the answers were for some of the questions we could anticipate. We had a big, laminated sign on the first page [of our binder] that said, “Pretend they’re all naked,” because it was important to get in the right frame of mind. I had the whole thing organized so that if a subject came up, I would give the official line, and then I could actually answer some questions. When the [press conference] was over at 2:30 everyday, I felt like I’d already worked a full day, so I’d go back to my office, take a nap for about 20 minutes, and then start all over again.

INTERVIEWS

The biggest scandal that happened during your tenure as press secretary was, of course, concerning Monica Lewinsky. How do you think it was handled, and what were the lessons learned from dealing with such a big press crisis?

The first lesson, which was a painful lesson, was that we all instantly assumed there was no way it was true. You sort of say, “How does a president have an affair with some kid?” Because there are so many Secret Service people around, it just couldn’t happen. So we started by disbelieving the allegation, which of course ended up being a mistake.

I learned the second lesson because I had worked my first job in Washington for the senator who went to jail in the Abscam investigation, which the movie American Hustle is about.

One of the lessons I learned … was not to get more information than … you can actually share publicly when it involves a legal case. I described the way I did my job earlier: most of the time I scrounged for information and wanted to find out as much as I could. But in the whole Lewinsky thing we said, “Okay, we don’t know what happened; it’s something involving President Clinton personally. If we start talking to him about what’s going on here or what’s the issue, then we will all be subject to subpoenas by the Independent Counsel.”

We all decided that we would only communicate the answers that came through the lawyers who had executive privilege and attorney-client privilege, so that we’re not jeopardizing the president’s own defense and putting ourselves in any kind of jeopardy. Otherwise I would have had to hire a lawyer and spend a lot of money. That ended up being a good thing to do because it meant that we had one story, we were sticking to it, we didn’t amplify, and we didn’t try to explain when he said, “I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky.” I got asked 227 times within the next three days what he meant by “sexual relations,” and I said, “I’m not going to parse the statement; I’m not going to amplify.”

If I had said, “Oh, he said he didn’t have sexual relations, so come on, it is what it is,” I would’ve been compounding the lie that he was in the middle of at that point, and I think that would have been much more troubling at the end. In a way, I kind of preserved our ability to still have credibility when we talked about other issues, because I wasn’t trying to invent some explanation [of ] something I didn’t know the full facts about. It ended up working out well, but boy, it was not a particularly comfortable situation.

After that scandal, trust in the government declined rapidly, but today we have a climate where there’s even less trust in government. What do

you think is the biggest failure in the communications strategy of politicians today?

Well, it’s not a PR problem; it’s a reality problem. The reality is that they’re not addressing these fundamentally important questions that the country has to deal with. And the reason for that [is] … there are no relationships of trust. People are not willing to go out on a limb and compromise. How did Bill Clinton survive doing something that would’ve gotten most chief executives fired? He was caught having an affair with a subordinate who actually was not much older than his daughter. Normally in a corporation the board of trustees would have fired the chief executive. He survived because he was doing his job, and people were relatively satisfied with the direction of the country. The economy was strong, and he was working with Newt Gingrich and the Republicans in Congress. Now, they didn’t always see eye to eye, but they at least had some sense that they could compromise and could work together. I think that was reassuring to the American people, who said, “Okay, Bill Clinton, he’s a bad dog, we know that. He did some bad things, but he’s doing the job we elected him to do, so let’s lay off the guy.” The problem now is the sense that all those mechanisms that need to be there to make things work are broken. We’re not seeing the cooperation between Republicans in Congress and the president to come together and deal with serious issues and get things done. Hopefully that will change, maybe on immigration reform or budget issues … people will come together. But I think that’s what is so dispiriting to people. They feel like this very bitter, divided system prevents people from doing the jobs that they’re supposed to be doing as elected officials. That’s troubling.

Any final thoughts?

My final thought is this: it’s not easy being involved in politics right now. And it’s probably not what Harvard’s undergraduate students or graduate students typically think of as a career path that they might want to pursue. But we really need good, smart, creative, committed people to get into the process and raise the overall quality of who we elect to office.

My admonition would be, I hope a lot of people who read the Harvard Political Review think about a career in politics at a staff level, or running for office, or getting engaged in some way, because public service is a really commendable thing, and it’s an important thing. I just hope more people take advantage of that, and the more we get our best and brightest to participate, the better off I think we’ll all be.

This interview has been edited and condensed.

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ENDPAPER

BEST YEARS OF OUR LIVES Andrew Seo

We are often reminded—by friends, relatives, and even the media—that the four years of college are the best years of our lives. Perhaps I was naïve at the time, back in the fall of 2010, but I certainly believed in this truism when I started at Harvard.

Four years later, after countless sleepless nights, term papers, moments of self-doubt, final exams, conflicts with friends, and other stress-inducing endeavors, I still believe that such is the case, but not in the way that I originally conceived and not in the way that many students have come to expect.

College has provided me, and many of my peers, the highest of the highs: moments of unadulterated beauty and joy that are simply unparalleled. Being a part of the Harvard Political Review and working with this group of talented editors and writers never ceases to amaze me. Going on Harvard’s Freshman Outdoor Program as a freshman, training to become a leader, and co-leading three trips in the New Hampshire woods was transformational. Going on excursions with friends to foreign and faroff lands like Jamaica and New Haven, listening to music, and confiding in one another our values and aspirations will always have immense meaning. I will always cherish these memories, as they remind me of what Harvard has to offer—the moments that I can confidently look back on and apply that superlative of this being the best of times.

But what I have come to realize over the years is that college—and Harvard especially—is not a monotonic experience, constantly trending upward from your first day to your last. The whole thing resembles something like a sinusoid. While the analogy is not perfect coming from a history concentrator, the takeaway is that there are peaks and valleys—the highs, but also, unfortunately, some of the lows. So while you will encounter these chapters of triumph, you also face corresponding moments of trial and struggle, academically, personally, emotionally, spiritually, and physically. There will be moments when these challenges, coming from different dimensions, will temper the allure of college. But there is a silver lining to it all.

Part of the wonder of college is emerging from these trials

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stronger than before. You learn things about yourself that you had never known before. You gain a better understanding of your values, your friends, and your dreams. And you develop a stronger sense of self and a network of support around you.

Thus, successive returns to the peaks get easier. The lows will not be as low.

Academically, the thesis writing process viscerally stands out as the embodiment of this theory. From dealing with the self-imposed isolation of research to confronting the undue pressure of having to make a pioneering discovery, the process was fraught with challenges that I had never really faced before.

This foray into academia certainly tested my mettle and resolve at times, and these moments of difficulty challenged the notion of college ever being the golden years.

Yet the state of vexation does not persist. Friends lift your spirits with notes of encouragement. You have late-night study break conversations when you talk about “nothing,” but somehow it means everything to you. Selfless mentors and faculty advisers offer you feedback and broadly take an interest in what you have to say. And you will have a Sunday morning moment of realization in Lamont when all the historical documents and facts click in your head like in a scene from National Treasure.

Somehow, in the end, the most taxing of academic experiences will actually make your college years the best.

Of course, academics constitute but one dimension. Over the years, you will confront a mix of conflicts related to friendships, relationships, internships, extracurriculars, principles, passions, and so much more. But with assistance from your peers, mentors, and loved ones, you can tackle any issue.

Our college years are some of our best exactly because we fight back. With the life-long friends we make and the sense of self we develop, we can face anything. But this is not the end. We will graduate better equipped to confront those challenges in life head-on and reach those peaks once more, climbing to even greater heights.

THE HARVARD POLITICAL REVIEW PRESENTS

THE POLITICS OF MEMORY LITERARY SUPPLEMENT SPRING 2014 HARVARDPOLITICS.COM/LIT-SUPPLEMENT